POLYMINAL

Enter your room. Go to sleep. Don't try to get away. POLYMINAL is a first-person game about a hotel you can't leave. It's a very nice hotel — clean carpet, soft light, a door in every wall. It simply doesn't end, and you'd quite like to get out and wake up. So you wander, down corridors that rearrange themselves the moment you blink, looking for an exit the building insists is around here somewhere. You are not unarmed. You have a water gun. This matters more than you'd think, because the furniture has opinions — chairs, vending machines, the odd filing cabinet wake up glowing molten-hot and come for you. So you hose them down: they hiss, they steam, they cool, and they come apart. Keep the tank full; running dry with something red-hot bearing down on you is, as a rule, the last thing you do. There's candy down here. Candy is money — collect it, don't eat it. You spend it making your water gun stronger, and it does get stronger, and it remains, at all times, a real water gun. You get tougher the deeper you go. You also get more tired, and tired is dangerous — which is exactly why your bed matters. Candy only counts if you carry it home, so make it back and sleep: the run saves, the building resets, and you wake on another floor you have never seen. Go far enough, something is waiting at the end — wrong, and completely silent. Try to beat it. Go further. Try again. You won't get out. But you still can try. Everything looks like a game you half-remember through fog — soft edges, vertex jitter, a dithered CRT haze — and the soundtrack hums to itself, then gets nervous when you're not alone. Single-player. The only way out is further in. Sleep well.