Lurk. Unite. Die. Invent. Think. Expire. is a Z-machine interactive fiction game written with Inform 6 and is © 1999 by Ryan Stevens (writing as "Rybread Celsius"). This game was entered in IF Comp 1999 where it took 35th place.
In this small and rather surreal game, your character is undescribed, and you can visit a handful of bizarre locations that seem to have nothing to do with each other. Maybe it's interesting? Or maybe it's a pointless waste of your time. You decide.
This solution is by David Welbourn, and is based on Release 1 of the game.
The Oven
Note that the initials of the game's title spell LUDITE. A luddite is someone who fears, dislikes, or is incompetent with new technology. I have no idea what that has to do with this game's content, though.
> x me. i. (Carrying nothing.)
> x rag. take rag. (Not worth it.)
> breath.
> e.
chaos hymn point
I had to cheat to learn both the "breath" and "anagram" verbs. Sadly, neither "sing" nor "listen" do anything special at this location.
> anagram. ne.
Prosthetic Flesh Fund
As near as I can tell, there's no way to open this door. And there's a bug if you try to "enter door", letting you briefly see Darkness, and you become stuck in "The Prosthetic Flesh Fund".
> x door. open door. (No handle on this side.)
> sw. se.
Apeirophobia
Apeirophobia is the fear of infinity.
> xyzzy.
Praying wins the game, although I have no idea why. You can pray at turn 1 and win the game then if you like.
> pray.
*** You have won ***
Yeah, I don't know what to make of this game. Seems like an empty exercise in surrealism for its own sake. If there's any deeper message to any of it, I didn't get it.
Incidentally, because this game was compiled in Inform's debug mode, it's possible to use debugging commands like tree, showobj, and gonear. Typing showobj door at Prosthetic Flesh Fund reveals that the door was supposed to lead to a location called "s3x p0t", but tree shows that it's an empty location, so I don't think we missed much.
There are no other characters in this game, but there are some mentions:
There's no inventory either.
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