Banal stuff first. Try to get from left to right. Use the right arrow key to move. When the colors flip, so does the direction you move.

Download:Windows (193KiB) Linux (50KiB)

Have you played it yet?
Good. Here's my pretentious indie-alysis.

Freedom has three different phases: white-on-black, black-on-white, and pure white. In each phase, white represents ideas and black represents people. The complex relationships between colors establish distict ideas that work together to reveal the truth about freedom.

After starting the game, the player is immediately presented with a white bar of thought in a black stream of people. The stream of people (or main stream) is guided on either side by two walls of conventional idea. The conceptual monoliths that guide the main stream are ancient and unchanging. They are familiar, but boring. The mainstream happily embraces the innovative new idea and pushes it onward toward freedom. The mainstream is not the only force at work, though.

The public embraces and uplifts the brilliant idea, but ignores the people behind it. The player now takes the role of the great thinkers behind the wonderful new idea. This is a black bar that exists inside the very walls that guide the mainstream. The innovators struggle to resist the influence of the pressing conventional thought patterns, but in vain. No matter how they struggle to remain original, the crushing walls always push the innovators away from the freedom they sought to achieve. The only way to progress is to take what little innovation there is and leave it unmodified. The thinkers must resist the temptation to enhance and expand the pure idea.

By retaining only the purist innovation, the thinkers finally bring their idea to the end of the mainstream: to freedom. But is it truly freedom? No! The walls of the mainstream press in, blocking any hope of return passage while the once-brilliant idea drowns in a sea of public exposure. It gets copied over and over again for fame and profit until it is finally nothing more than an extension of the very system it fought to escape. The idea remains, but the originality fades; it is forever imprisoned.

How, then, can any idea truly achieve freedom? The answer is obscurity. It must stand still as a rock in the mainstream, ignored by the rushing human current. It must remain unmolested by its creator and its audience alike. By resisting the greedy minds of the public, it remains pure and unique. By resisting the lofty dreams of its creator, it remains elegant and original. By relying on nothing but its own existence for guidance, it remains truly free.