Universal Library vs A Thousand Faces

This game is a simulation of the universal library described in a short story, "The Library of Babel", by Jorge Luis Borges. The story can be found in several published collections and websites. As described, the Library contains all books of a certain size whose text is any possible sequence of lower-case letters and simple punctuation, even if it is nonsense. This simulation is of an interesting corner of the Library, tiny compared to the Borges vision, but large enough to get lost in. The game is an explorable virtual environment with a few treasure-hunt-like activities leading to books with meaningful content. There is a book that players can erase and rewrite to make into their own "personal vindication", and a book with a practically infinite number of pages. Individual books are searchable. You can mark and return easily to any alcove with an interesting book.

You are riding across a vast desert, but you don't remember why. You only know that if you look behind you, you will die. Your horse is a demon from some nightmare realm and charges across the sands as his red eyes illuminate the twilight. You do remember this: you were holding someone’s hand just now. His last act before he passed was to make you promise to not give up, to keep going. You don’t remember why he’s important to you, but you feel a keen grief. And you must ride north, towards the city of Panarch. In A Thousand Faces, you are a hero in all the most unexpected and twisted ways. You have the power to fearstrike reality into compliance. You can wield the First Fires of Creation, which ignited the Big Bang. And you can walk the five realms of the dream world: Reverie, Prophecy, Consensus, Jubilee, and Terror. But your enemies are fifteen-foot-tall wolves who wander the void between worlds, medusas whose gaze casts you in the stone of grief, and bleeding books whose passages can corrupt your mind. Most of all, you are in a society with so much outward beauty but with a festering secret worse than mere monsters. Take on the role of a warrior who loves the unloved things of the world, the feared things, the hated things. You are the horror barring the path when the peasants with pitchforks go to burn the witch. And you are on a mission with devastating consequences to all involved. There is no winning, only ensuring the enemy loses more than you do. A Thousand Faces is a choose-your-own adventure role-playing game that aspires to the storytelling richness of amazing titles like Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate, and Final Fantasy. It is from a solo indie dev who wrote the story, composed the music, designed the combat, and created the app. There is a growing community of players on Discord, fan art, and sharing of combat (and dating sim!) strategies. Stop doom scrolling. Read literature and solve puzzles instead. Join us. “We will all ride past death as one.”