DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
The Outer Limits
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
ALEX SPENCER
The letterbox can be a wonderful thing, especially when you’re not expecting whatever arrives through it. This is one of the few perks of being forgetful. You can have a lovely email exchange with someone from PostCurious about its ‘puzzletales’, a sort of mail-order escape room – and then when the result of that conversation hits your mat, a few weeks later, it comes as a total surprise. Which turns out to be the perfect way to meet The Morrison Game Factory.
On opening the box, you’re presented with a jumble of game components: cards, coloured dice and counters, a board that doesn’t seem to correspond to any of the rest of it. The kind of boxed-up leftovers that have surely occupied every airing cupboard in the country at some point. But here there’s also a letter, apparently written in felt-tip pen, addressed “from one adventurer to another”. It explains that this box was found in an abandoned factory, still on the conveyor belt, then directs you to their urban exploration blog. From here, The Morrison Game Factory becomes a videogame of sorts, albeit one with an awful lot of peripherals. Most of the actual interaction is done in a web browser, a DOS-styled text interface providing clues for how to use all the bits of cardboard and plastic laid out in front of you, in order to unlock new snippets of story on the website.