External Links


Play Online
Play this game in your Web browser.
Release zip
Contains tethered-rel4/play-offline/index.html
Post-comp release (recommended). Contains custom web interpreter, Z-code, C64 version, and walkthrough.
Play this game in your Web browser. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)
Story File
Original IFComp release
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough and map
by David Welbourn

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

Tethered

by Linus Åkesson profile

2018

Web Site

(based on 29 ratings)
5 reviews

About the Story

"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."

-- Chuang Tzu


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Writing - 2018 XYZZY Awards

23rd Place - 24th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2018)

Editorial Reviews

IFComprehensive

To me, the most compelling works of interactive fiction are ones that take advantage of the unique features of the medium. “Tethered” tells a story that a conventional, noninteractive work of fiction would not be able to accomplish. The story begins with a woman being stranded during a snowstorm, but it quickly turns into something more unsettling.
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(7)
4 star:
(14)
3 star:
(8)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 5
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Short with a strong story, June 22, 2020
by Denk
Related reviews: Dialog

Finally, I got around playing Tethered on a real Commodore 64. However, this review isn't really about playing the game on a retro-machine but the fact that I enjoyed playing the game again almost two years later and decided to make a review. I enjoyed the original z-machine version during IFcomp 2018. The only comment I have about the C64 version is that it was fast enough to be just as enjoyable.

I did remember several of the puzzles so it did not take me much time to complete it the second time around. I don't want to give away any details about the game as that would spoil the game. The story is strong and well told and as far as I remember from my first playthrough, all the puzzles are fair. I highly recommend this game.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Solid drama that shows off a new IF language, November 26, 2018

Tethered starts with an adrenaline-pumping premise: You, Charles, are climbing a snowy mountain. You are roped to your partner Judith, when she slips and falls into a crevasse. What do you do? Well, there's really only one thing you can do. Then the game proper truly starts.

Most of Tethered takes place in a cave on a mountainside. This is a classic IF setting and so can often feel stale, but the premise of Tethered makes it come across as natural and fresh - more of a nod to IF's roots in Colossal Cave than something derivative.

Gameplay-wise, there are a couple of clever puzzles involving a rope that can be stretched between multiple rooms. One of these puzzles has an alternate solution that I found by looking at the walkthrough after I finished the game; this alternate solution may remind some players of a prominent puzzle in a prominent game from last year's IFComp. Also, I love the game's solution to the problem of navigating a cave in the dark: It's completely intuitive yet fairly original from an IF standpoint.

Like several other games from this year's IFComp, as you play Tethered further you realize that there is more going on here than appears at first. The ending is poignant and moving - and it adds a powerful twist on the game's name: "Tethered."

Make sure you check out the game's response to XYZZY.

Finally, a word about the language: Tethered is the first game in the author's new IF-writing language Dialog. It looks impressive to me so far. In particular, the rope-between-multiple-rooms feature is apparently a difficult one to implement in most traditional parser languages. The fact that it works smoothly in Tethered indicates something about the complexity of Dialog.

Overall, I found Tethered to be yet another of the many strong dramas in this year's IFComp.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A slightly unique masterpiece, May 18, 2019

Wow! Tethered was good on so many levels. It's short, but exactly as long as it needs to be. I spent roughly an hour with it and was left both impressed and emotionally affected. Every obstacle felt like a necessary part of the story, while the player's progression was usually slightly different than expected, resulting in an experience both familiar and unique.

There are several things for the player to figure out. In most cases, I would probably refer to them as puzzles. Here, it felt like the wrong term; they're so intertwined with the story (a story that is deep and serious but never in a way that feels didactic or overly dramatic) that I hardly noticed them. It's not often (with any medium) that my experience is so immersive.

Although I expect that the author could have made a more or less equally good story in any IF language, the several little things that were unique in Tethered made me think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. While it in general would be silly to apply such thoughts to most programming languages (their differences being so well-defined), this is obviously not the case for IF authoring languages. Some things are more difficult in Inform 7 and therefore rarely done, something that fundamentally affects the story. A new language, such as the author's Dialog, represents an opportunity to do new things in old ways and old things in new, something Åkesson succeeded with rather perfectly.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

See All 5 Member Reviews

Tethered on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Tethered appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Favorite "atmosphere" games by MathBrush
These are games that are fun because of the atmosphere and plot more than the puzzles. These games are not too hard and not too easy. They generally have a big over-arching theme. I have included most horror and comedy games in other...

Great games in a mostly realistic setting by MathBrush
These are games that for the most part don't contain magical elements or futuristic technology. This includes games where there might be magic or futuristic technology, but you don't know until the end. So several of these games do...

My new walkthroughs for June 2019 by David Welbourn
On Friday June 28, 2019, I published new walkthroughs for the games listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works of interactive...

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for Tethered:

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Overall Puzzles of 2018 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2018 which you think might be worth considering for Best Puzzles in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination.This is not an official list. The point of poll is partly to suggest...

Fate vs Free Will Games by loocas
I imagine that the interactive nature of IF would allow themes of fate and free will to be used powerfully. Perhaps the PC is given a glimpse of his or her future and the player tries to avoid it. Are there games in which this is done?...

"Weird and Eerie" interactive fiction by Dawn Sueoka
I’m reading and really enjoying The Weird and the Eerie, by critic Mark Fisher. In this book, Fisher explores the sense of something’s being simultaneously unsettling and fascinating. “Weird” and “eerie,” according to Fisher, are the...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 11 of this page, edited by Fredrik Ramsberg on 5 July 2022 at 5:26pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page