Demo for The Main Menu comes online

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Meta point-and-click techno-horror adventure unveiled on Steam for Windows PC

Even before the advancement of AI, it sometimes seemed like computers had minds of their own. Well, in Cat Dev Games' upcoming techno-horror The Main Menu, this is very much the case. But surely that's okay, because it claims to have your only best interests in mind, and a computer would never lie. Right? 

Things start out ominously enough, as you regain consciousness tied to a chair in a dark room. Before you is a computer monitor powered up with a "corrupted main menu" on-screen. This is no ordinary computer, as you quickly discover when its female-sounding voice refers to you by name, Fetch, and tells you how different you are from the others. The voice "wants you to follow instructions," except you couldn't even if you tried as "the buttons don’t behave like buttons" but rather movable elements with tangible effects on the screen itself. Even more surprisingly, as you manipulate parts of the deceptively mundane interface, the room around you also physically changes to reflect your actions. Believing this to be your only means of escape but unsure exactly how, you must "start touching things you weren’t supposed to." Unfortunately, as you "begin to understand the relationship between the menu and room," you're hindered at every step by the "the mysterious Entity [who] interferes with any progress, introducing new obstacles and raising questions about what's really controlling the game."

Much of The Main Menu takes place entirely within the computer's own reactive interface, allowing players to "break, drag, and manipulate [it] to alter the physical world, uncover hidden systems, and escape the Entity controlling it." On this machine a "button can become material ... [or] a simple arrow can take you somewhere the entity does not want you to reach." It's not unlike the hands-on meta design of the acclaimed There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, which the developers unsurprisingly cite as an influence. But while Draw Me A Pixel's classic took more of a darkly humorous tone, this game leans more into "surreal horror" as it transforms "familiar UI conventions into puzzles, mystery, and psychological damage." It isn't meant to take long, instead aiming to provide a "short, focused ... experience designed around discovery, tension" and satisfying rewards for "wait… can I click that?" curiosity and experimentation. 

The Main Menu has no target release date just yet, but you can begin tampering with the machine right away through the playable demo available now on Steam for Windows PC. 

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