You're Stephen Colbert and you have a whole day's worth of adventuring to do in your office—you know, the one you have now taken over as a result of your new gig at The Late Show.
What do you do?
That's the basic premise behind a brand-new text-based browser game designed to promote Colbert's to-be-unveiled version of The Late Show. Entitled "Escape from the Man-Sized Cabinet," the game is a bit simpler to navigate than the kind of game you might think of when you hear "text adventure."
Space Quest, this is not. Instead of typing in commands and hoping that whatever you're trying to do has an actual, scripted outcome in the game, Escape from the Man-Sized Cabinet just asks you to click on highlighted words in a kind of choose-your-own-adventure-like setup. Among the fun little things you can do include checking Colbert's to-do list which, if you've been watching his promotional videos for the show so far, you'll know that the items on it can be a bit… fanciful, to put it mildly.
Eventually, though, the game takes you to a location that feels a lot like Narnia—without being named as such, of course. And you even travel through an official "Man-Sized Cabinet" to get there, hence the game's name.
We won't spoil much else of the plot, except for the brief note that, yes, you can die in the game if you make choices that are completely wrong. (Really, you thought it was a good idea to stand inside of a Man-Sized Cabinet for an entire day? Don't you ever get hungry? Thirsty?)
The game was created using the open-source tool Twine, which allows anyone with an imagination (and a lot of time) to create similar text-based adventures. And yes, Colbert's game does have graphics; by text-based, we're not just talking about command prompts. Though we definitely wish there was a way to have some catchy 8-bit music for the different scenes—to really make the cabinet-themed experience even more of an adventure.