Released earlier this year, Pry is a look at the life of a soldier who is wrestling with demons. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the best look at PTSD in gaming, and one of the most fascinating games released in recent memory.
Pry is an iOS take on interactive fiction that makes House of Leaves seem boring by comparison. Yes, I am saying that a text-heavy game gave me a better experience than a book did.
It combines snippets of video and text to do a really cool thing with fiction that’s not actually possible with normal books. You can pull apart strings of text to see further into them, or to take a peek into the narrator’s subconscious. Or, you can open your eyes to pay attention to the “real” world when the stuff that’s floating around in your brain becomes too hard to bear. Words literally unravel or collapse into each other, and it all works beautifully in crafting a unique story that may only be possible through a game. It’s the sort of thing that makes me excited about the future of storytelling.
Right now, only a few chapters are available, but there are more are coming down the line. You can check the game out on the App Store here.