Penrose is a haunted interactive novella that's happy for you to mess with causality

Before I started playing Penrose, I had begun to fear I was losing my capacity to read. When I’d sit down to work each morning, I’d already be drowning in unread text from the day before – 85 open browser tabs, a dozen PDFs, and stacks of half-read books spread across the floor, coffee table, and sofa arms. Some days, all the open tabs and files would crash my laptop as soon as I opened the lid. Other days, my brain would crash before I could even make it through a paragraph, short-circuited by my own greedy desire to learn about anything other than what I was already reading – the history of Roman coins, the speculative links between Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia, the geologic history of Antarctica, a neuroscientist who tried to teach animals to play musical instruments.

Michael Townsend, who developed Penrose through his Toronto-based studio Doublespeak Games, describes it as a 50,000-word “non-linear, interactive novella.” To me that sounded like another brick in the wall of the text-based tomb I had interred myself in, being slowly embalmed by the fruitless fluids of my own curiosity. But I also liked Townsend’s work, including A Dark Room, the cryptic survival clicker game that had become an unexpected hit on the App Store in 2013. In the years since, he’d pursued a career of studied minimalist game design, tinkering with unassuming ideas that quietly morph into elaborate arboreal contraptions. He uses games as a medium for thinking more than doing, which can sometimes make his work seem formless and withholding, and other times startlingly immersive and urgent.

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Penrose tells the story of a brother and sister searching for clues about their mother, a scientist who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when they were children. In practice, it’s less of a narrative than a kind of open-world puzzle game that uses text as a scrollable landscape. It has more in common with memento mori-style games – like Her Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, Myst, or even Metroid Prime – a linguistic peephole into some tragic set of past events that have insisted on spilling over into the present.