This fictional game show CD-ROM in the style of Knightmare is secretly the best horror game of the year

Frontiers Of The Mind is cursed, by which I mean 7-Zip turned red while I was extracting the file. What ugly encounter deep in the bowels of my download file caused this temporary anomaly? No time to think about that. After playing this horror game, I now have too much other to ask.

Frontiers Of The Mind is presented as an interactive CD-ROM experience (cool!) that documents the history of a fictional Knightmare-inspired children’s series. Every time you click on it, you feel uneasy as you explore the archives.

Between 1987 and 1994, the British channel Network7 broadcast 112 episodes of the TV game show Maze Masters, an interactive adventure aimed at a younger audience. Only a few parts of the show were aired.

The different sections of this CD-ROM explore the format and the backstage of the show. The idea is to shed new light on the strange events that have been revealed since.

There’s a kind of Hitchcockian horror to it. Going in, you know there are horrific revelations waiting for you – the suspense is in slowly unravelling the details as you dig through folders and discover more about the show’s history. Ganzfeld tests. Post-show paraphysical cleansing. A dungeon master with a migraine-inducing stare. “Bertram left his mark on a generation of viewers.” I, uh. Yeah. I bet he did.

All of this is brought to life by extremely evocative but suitably detached documentary-style prose narratives and snapshots of ‘images’ that are both intricately convincing and deeply haunting if you stop to think about what you’re actually looking at. Both the muddy, spacey soundtrack and the image editing are particularly brilliant – somewhere between an SCP and that dubious VHS that came with the DragonStrike board game.

It’s masterfully done: nostalgic, creative, horrible, and delightful. You can find it here on Itch.io.