If you glanced at Roche Limit’s grim nightmare, with its empty landscapes and pixelated characters, you probably wouldn’t know it all worked in PowerPoint. Leaves fall, eyes blink, and trees twist in ways far beyond anything I thought possible in the organizational software I had successfully avoided since high school. I remember thinking the dissolve transitions were cold, but I think the whole horror thing was too.
Quietly released in 2022, but recently gains notorietyprogrammer Jack Strait assembled the “thousandth slide deck” using gifs and hyperlinks, according to a 2023 interview with him. Game creator. His first game, The EdCo Incident, was also created in PowerPoint because he had lost a copy of Gamer Maker a few years earlier.
But it doesn’t look like previous experience made it any easier to make Roche Limit. One of the game’s spoiler-based features required duplicating several slides for each branch and manually going through them to make sure all the links were to the right ones.
“But it was nice to ask ourselves a question, not: ‘What should this game be like?’ but instead: “What is this PowerPoint game supposed to be?” – he said.
It’s hard to tell where the limits are once you see it in action. Roche Limit looks like a point-and-click adventure game that is intentionally simplistic or retro and flows seamlessly from scene to scene like Monkey Island. Unless you had to download the .ppsx file to play it, it looks like any other esoteric horror game you’ll find on Itch.io.
Cheerful harbinger for Roche Limit doesn’t mention its medium either, and in a way I like how it adds to the unsettling atmosphere when you find out it’s only available through the MediaFire link in the video description. “What if your house was hiding something?” – he asks. And while it says that an inconspicuous house that looks like it’s covered in dried blood isn’t hiding anything, the only way to find out is to run PowerPoint 2016 or later to see for yourself. I suppose that technically makes Roche Limit a Microsoft exclusive: it needs a current version of Office to work.
You can also get the game in the mail from Strait themselves – provided they still offer this service a few years later. In an interview with Game Developer, he said he wanted as many people as possible to play it, and would send you a QR code with a download link if you emailed him and asked nicely. Shipping is free, but it has Venmo and Cashapp in case you want to facilitate cover it.
