October 9th 2011

The 1990s TV drama Twin Peaks, by David Lynch and Mark Frost, remains one of the most baffling, brilliant and relentlessly strange things I’ve ever seen on the telly, and Black Lodge 2600 – a new free PC game, but one that pretends to be an old Atari title – does a good job of continuing the Twin Peaks trend toward the surreal. Your protagonist, as in the TV series, is FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, and at the start you’ll find yourself in the red-curtained room that many still associate with the show.

What follows, though, is a game in which you must locate the secret exit of a collection of similar rooms without being caught by one of the other characters. Various Twin Peaks types rear their heads, most removing points from your score if they catch you. But bump into your doppelgänger who occasionally appears out of nowhere, and it’s game over.

The website suggests that, as with all Atari games, you should read the manual before you begin. You should, otherwise nothing makes any sense. Even with your newly acquired knowledge, the visual motifs and utterly unnerving sound effects make this as downright bonkers as its source material.