The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge

When the inventor/magician known as Old Man Bill suddenly disappears from his house in the middle of the desert, his friends, companions and pets start worrying: what could have happened? To solve this sinister mystery, they call upon their old acquaintance, pretentious game designer Jonas Kyratzes, who builds a magical portal into the Lands of Dream. Using this portal, YOU can now interact with the wondrous and colourful world of the house at Desert Bridge, and help Harold the Talking Picture Frame and his friends locate their master, Old Man Bill.

In reality, The Strange and Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge is a transdimensional portal – but if your friends don’t believe you, tell them it is something of an old-school adventure game, with wonderful hand-drawn graphics, beautiful music and a lot of humour. Or, if they’re more into feature lists, you could say something like this:

Colourful hand-drawn graphics!
Beautiful music!
A lot of humour! (Some of it funny.)
And some serious bits, too.
Red herrings! (Literal and metaphorical.)
A dinosaur in the garden!
Many fascinating characters to meet!
Non-linear structure! (More or less.)
More content than you can shake a wet carrot at!
The only inventory system ever to feature the “gerbelize” option!
Not a single annoying action sequence or minigame!
Brew potions! (Even some useful ones!)
A lot fewer exclamation marks than this list!
Freeware!

And now for the game’s requirements.

Windows 95/98/2000/XP/ME/Vista.
Linux + WINE. (Tested, but may need some tweaking.)
50 MB of free space on your hard drive.
A mouse or similar rodent.
A keyboard.
A sense of humour.

Some people have apparently said things about this portal:

“one bloody funny adventure game [...] really takes absurdism to a whole new level, even for a genre that is kind of heavy on it.” (The Independent Gaming Source, apparently in the belief that this is actually a “game”.)
“The humor is actually cute and funny [...] The art, although simple, is charming and colorful. The characters are well-rendered and lovable. The music [...] is cute, and some pieces, such as the subtle choral upstairs variation of the theme, qualify as gorgeous. The ending is delightful. And Bob the Spider.” (Gregory Weir at Ludus Novus, who understands the nature of the portal. Bob the Spider is grateful for being mentioned, and will not forget about this when his career as the world’s first arachnid superstar takes off.)
“Desert Bridge is a wonderful work to behold. It’s a story book for grown ups, a fairy tale for philosophers and parents. It instills in you the memory of what it is like to view the world as a child, to see everything with wonder, and at the same time it bears the burden of age, conflict, and struggle.” (Jay is Games. This is all true. Also, you can gerbelize things.)
“To some extent, all of this makes the game seem like it must be targeted at children, but it’s really not. The humour’s quite sophisticated and sometimes subtle, there’s a distinct hint of sadness throughout, and without giving away the ending, let me just mention that the word ’sinister’ in the title doesn’t mean that everyone is left handed.” (meme-hazard. There’s that ‘game’ thing again.)

Now, before you download the game, please read the following disclaimer from Bob the Spider:

This is not a game for children. It’s actually not a game at all, of course, but a transdimensional portal to the Lands of Dream – but if you can’t grasp that, and would like to think of it as a game, then you have to understand that it’s not a “game” for children. Yes, both the house at Desert Bridge and its inhabitants are bright and colourful, and occasionally even funny, but that does not mean that they are meant for children. It’s not an adult “game” either – many young people may enjoy this. But not if they’re six, or can barely read. We like to use long words. And some of us even use words that are naughty (very rarely, but still).

So, if you belong to that group of people (in the words of Donald Trefusis), “whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears” then please fuck off.

If you complain anyway, I will be forced to assume that you cannot read, and should not be raising children. Should you persist in your complaints, I will send my arachnid army after you. You would not like that. We are hairy.

Thank you,
Bob the Spider

You may now proceed to download the game by clicking here.

(The filesize is 39.5 MB.)

For those few of you who have encountered an odd problem with Windows not liking Desert Bridge (which is odd, considering it is a type of window itself) and causing the portal to scale improperly: the problem is caused by your DPI settings, which are not the standard 96. This is an annoying issue, and a group of wild gerbils is currently trying to find a way of making it work.

The following people are responsible for the creation of this portal:

Jonas Kyratzes – created the portal itself.
Verena Huber Kyratzes – marvellously illustrated the world of Desert Bridge for human eyes.
Helen Trevillion – composed and recorded the beautiful music.
Harold the Talking Picture Frame – designed the menus you interact with.
Bob the Spider – wrote the manual.

The portal was tested for transdimensional safety by (in random order):