We are, as a people, awash in old operating system simulators. The Roottrees Are Dead, Hack ’95, Pipes.exe—something deep inside us yearns for the old ways. We remember, hazily, as though glimpsed through fog, a time when booting up the PC yielded an ethereal Brian Eno startup noise and a world of possibility, rather than an Office 365 upsell and exciting new AI features*.
We are also all getting old, yes. That might have something to do with it too.
The latest entry into the crowded fake OS genre is Desktop Explorer, a mystery/horror game that tasks you with poking through the clearly-but-not-explicitly Windows 95 machine that’s been left to you by your uncle. Unc’s mind has gone to pieces and his computer is filled with mysteries—ever-deepening puzzles that task you with assembling clues, piecing together events, and using an expanding suite of era-appropriate software to figure just what the heck your uncle was mixed up in, and to find the passwords to locked files that peel back layer after layer of the game’s motivating mystery.
Desktop Explorer’s pseudo-PC is wild and untamed—the rich and unexplored land of ’90s computing rendered in faithful detail. There is no cloud here, no apps, and the desperate desire of tech firms to herd us all into neat walled gardens had not yet taken hold. It is the computing of wandering down a file tree and seeing what you find. Often, what you find is ghosts.
The computer, like most computers, is haunted. As you plumb deeper into the mystery, eerie goings-on start happening, first in the relatively benign format of corrupted files, later in crashes, symbols, and faces that manifest behind your cluttered windows.
It’s genuinely quite spooky, insofar as a Windows 95 personal computer can be scary, and I don’t think I’m far enough in for things to get properly supernatural yet. As for the puzzles, I’ve had a good time with them. The ones I’ve encountered range from straightforward to pleasant—but not overly frustrating—brainteasers.
The rhythm is good: you plough your way through three or four puzzles in a row before the game hits you with one that at least makes you pause for a minute, mousing through all the programs available to you and options in your file browser to figure just which bit of arcane ’90s computing technology you need to get yourself going again.
A glance at the game’s Steam page suggests there are even stranger puzzles to come, even—this is surely where it all goes downhill—the ability to get the internet working and to start integrating web results into your puzzle-solving. In the hour or so I’ve spent with it, Desktop Explorer is a game that remembers when the computer was itself a bit of a mystery: an unmapped land whose edges and limits you had to find for yourself. It’s nice to return.
*You can find the Linux distro that’s right for you over on Distrosea, just by the by.
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