Horror in paragraphs
Łukasz Radecki’s Swirownia is a paragraph game in the atmosphere of a dark horror, in which we play the role of four young people setting off (at night, of course) to the infamous abandoned psychiatric hospital, colloquially known by young people as a “freak room”. This place is connected with mysterious cases of disappearances, as well as fatal accidents of the daredevils visiting it. The police attribute most of these events to the unfortunate fate, drunkenness or carelessness of partygoers, and do not take the testimonies of teenagers telling out-of-the-box stories too seriously. And what really happens to them and why it is so hard to believe in it, we will discover the hard way by going through the following paragraphs of the book.
Choose wisely. Or not, it doesn’t matter – as you like
In the game, when choosing paragraphs, we can use our common sense, intuition or courage, but in the end most of the events seemed completely random to me. This is often perversely different from the reader’s intentions. On the one hand, it’s good, because reading is very surprising and sometimes even funny situations result from it, but on the other – sometimes I missed a greater, more conscious influence on the fate of the characters.
At first, we may be too foresight to save teenagers from getting into trouble and even finish the game before we even enter the psychiatrist’s premises, but later it is not so easy and when we try to be prudent, we sometimes get into an even worse situation. In short – the slogan from the description of the book “You Decide Who Dies” is a slight exaggeration. Finally, on the fingers of one hand, we can count the choices in the book that require you to move your head and show your knowledge or cleverness (which in total introduced an interesting variety each time). At the end of the game, many people will be surprised what choice will have the greatest final impact on winning.
20 faces of fear
Freak Room has about twenty different endings and many alternative stories, in which we go deeper and deeper into the dark corners of an abandoned building and discover the terrifying secrets it hides. Let me tell you that most of the events our whole group will not come out alive and sometimes those who survive will eventually end up even worse. The goal of the game is therefore to find the only ending in which we will learn all the secrets, and at the same time none of the four friends will die.
Since this is one of those games where we are constantly dying, and starting over and over again can be a bit annoying, I recommend “saving the game” using the bookmark. It is also worth reading all the alternative situations, because sometimes you can find hidden flavors in them, or perhaps even unplanned gags, when, for example, in one of the versions someone from teenagers says that “he cannot imagine how you can do something so stupid”, and in the next one accidentally does exactly this himself, or once openly talks about his fear, and elsewhere he acts as a hero. Therefore, we have the opportunity to meet our brave daredevils from several different sides.
“What’s a Psycho killer?”
The book combines various, seemingly unrelated, disturbing threads that can be associated with other known horror movies. In the dark depths of cellars, we will come across other teenagers trapped in macabre traps and we will have to play a game like from the Saw series , and in addition, we will be chased by a psychopathic killer with a rather original appearance, the outline of which is shown on the cover. He enjoys killing young people like many iconic villains from the classic slasher genre from the 80s and 90s. You will discover his obscure motives, as well as other sick and bloodcurdling secrets of this place yourself in the reading. I think the atmosphere of Swirownia will surely appeal to fans of horror.
A horror of mistakes
Unfortunately, the plot itself has a few minor errors, e.g. you can hold a map that has not yet been found in your hand or you can accidentally find a completely different paragraph – with a puzzle, where you should choose a hand with the number of fingers corresponding to a specific volume of Dziady(by the way – great idea), we accidentally get to another number. In my first game, I happened to follow a storyline in which the heroes did not visit either McDonald’s or the gallery at the beginning, and suddenly, at the very end of the book, I had to base the choice of the next paragraph on this very event. In addition, during the game we have to write down how many dashes of the battery and how many phones we will decide to use as a light source, which supposedly could have been of key importance later, but in the end we find no reference to it anywhere in the rest of the book (and I am not hiding it I waited).
