iD

iD was published for the ZX Spectrum in 1986 by CRL, a company with a taste for releases other publishers would not have dared put in shops. This is not a game in the usual sense. There is no character to steer through rooms, no maze and no inventory. You sit at a computer and talk to an entity that has taken up residence inside it.

The whole program is a conversation. You ask, it answers, and your task is to earn its trust and piece together who it actually is and what inanimate things it has inhabited before. An electronic personality that reached Earth long before humanity had plenty of time to wander, and its memory is in pieces. Progress is not measured in points or by a map but by how much your counterpart is willing to let you know. Static illustrations accompany the text and sharpen the mood further.

Playing it feels genuinely odd and some people will bail out within five minutes. There is no ordinary parser with commands like take or go north, so the first thing you must work out is how to phrase a question at all so that the entity responds. Get that right and the game has real atmosphere, unsettling in the best way. Get it wrong and you are just hammering the keyboard and receiving evasive sentences.

Today iD is interesting mainly as proof that eight-bit machines carried experiments far outside the commercial genres. It is worth recommending to anyone who enjoys interactive fiction and does not mind a game that resists them. If you want a clear goal and steady rewards, look elsewhere.

On oldgame.cz iD runs directly in your browser, with no emulator to set up and nothing to install.