( C Y C L E )

About ( C Y C L E )

( C Y C L E ) is a short browser piece released free on itch.io by DOMINO CLUB, with the story credited on its title screen to slipperman. Its maker says it uses no engine at all: plain web pages styled with CSS and a few lines of script that swap words in the text. The photographs were run through a dithering tool, which gives them their grainy one- and two-colour look. Its motto is vires acquirit eundo, it gathers strength as it goes.

It starts from a plain observation: every large city has an underground as large as itself, from sewers and bunkers to car parks and stations, and your own basement if you have one. The narrator has a friend, an archaeologist working with the company that is building a new big railway tunnel, a tunnel that will swallow people from one of its mouths and bring them up somewhere else. Through her, and through the workers she meets, the story goes deeper.

You read by clicking. Highlighted words open asides about the people involved, pages give way to the next, and the text sits beside or over orange and black-and-white photos of tunnel crews, curved concrete and broken pottery dug out of the ground. Players in the comments describe it as a nightmarish, haunting read rather than a game with scares.

It suits readers who like quiet urban legends and weird fiction, and anyone who has felt uneasy about how much earth sits between a tunnel and the street.

How to play ( C Y C L E )

1. Open the itch.io page and press Run cycle; it plays in the browser, nothing to download.
2. Click through from the title screen.
3. Read each page and click the highlighted words to open the asides.
4. Follow the links onward until the story ends, a few minutes later.

Tips

• Open every highlighted word: the asides hold much of the story about the people underground.
• Take it slowly: the pictures change with the text, and the piece is short enough to read twice.
• Use Restore cycle on the itch.io page to reopen it where you were.

Questions