Play it here: whereareu.online

An internaut tries to contact his long lost internet friend, but must face obstacles in a web they don’t recognize anymore.

Coded from start to finish in 48 hours as part of the European Permacomputing Game Jam, this game uses as few resources as possible to explore this years's jam theme: resistance to technological violence. Offering roughly 15 minutes of gameplay while still weighting a minuscule 1.6MB on disk, this game is also entirely coded with open source technologies and is open source itself, in the spirit of the utopian ideal of permacomputing.

Based on the author's nostalgia for a simpler yet empowering 2010s web, the player will have to face a serie of puzzles reminiscent of the modern web's dark patterns: invasive popups, ads that masquerade as fake buttons, and more. At each level, the player is free to use the web navigator itself as a medium to resolve puzzles, so it's encouraged to think outside of the (browser) box.

The game also explores the feeling of fragility of this old web. Coded while the Wayback Machine was still down, the game also references major data loss incidents, like the 2019 MySpace Datapocalypse or the 2011 Gmail deletions.

(spoiler below for the ending explanation)

The seventh level is a sliding puzzle of a picture of Ethel, the long lost internet friend that we've been looking for since the beginning. The puzzle is not actually solvable. Overlay text starts to appear. It's written in large serif font, sign of the enshittified new web, contrasting with the small monospace font used until now. The text reveals that the picture is actually of a character from Hackers, a pop cyberpunk movie from 1995, thereby challenging the veracity of the player's romanticized view of the past web, which, after all, wasn't perfect at all, marked with Limewire's viruses, innefective spam mail filtering, and sluggish connections.

The finale blends puzzle-solving with generative art, depicting particles flowing freely between browser tabs. This abstract representation captures the internet's essence: a whimsical, fragile, yet powerful communication medium, for better or worse. The final link teases "You won!" but on hover adds "Or did you?..." leaving players to contemplate whether the web's evolution is progress or regression while observing the final artistic piece.