BLACK LODGE is for one player only.
Life’s been a bit stressful lately, so to chill out I’ve been playing Black Lodge 2600. It’s a game where you run through countless repeating rooms while avoiding your doppelganger so he doesn’t fuse with a demon and steal your soul. You know, calming stuff.
This is an Atari-style Twin Peaks game that’s been floating around since 2011, manifested by entertainer and game developer Jak Locke. Even if you don’t play it, take a look at its instruction manual. I mean look at it. Well, here’s the full scoop. First off:
Here’s the Black Lodge 2600 official page, where you can play the game directly in your browser or download it.
And here’s the manual (it’s a PDF).
Wrong Way
In the game, you play as Special Agent Dale Cooper as he tries to navigate the waking nightmare that is the Black Lodge and escape his doppelganger, who follows closely behind. Also watch out for chairs, the unexpected menace of the other side. The whole point is that you’re plopped into the finale of Twin Peaks season two. Spoilers, I guess, but we’re running on a timeline of over 35 years here. We have to keep moving.
In true Atari fashion, I decided to try this out first without reading a thing. Even though the game’s site has “READ THE MANUAL” in big bold letters at the top of the page. That’s how it was done, though, right? I’m not even sure I’ve ever laid eyes on a physical Atari game manual, to be honest. But Black Lodge gets the style right, either way. Without guidance, I ended up just circling the waiting room while the Man from Another Place silently judged me. It is what it is.
After figuring out what was going on (as much as you can in a place like the Black Lodge), it’s actually pretty fun. The gameplay is simple, just like something you’d see back on the old Atari, more or less. You get a little mix of the repetitive stages (and danger cues) from Pitfall! with the relentless chase of Halloween. Locke calls it more of an “Atari(ish)” game, somewhere between “an Atari 8-bit or Nintendo Entertainment System” (from this interview).
As you go room to room, more and more obstacles appear in your way. Laura Palmer shows up, and screams loud enough to scramble your controls. Leland lurks in the hallway, just like he did in the finale. The audio voice clips nail that sort of monotonous reverse-speech of the red room, too. They were already pretty digitized to begin with. And there are other surprises.
How’s Annie, though? Hohohohohoho.
Black Lodge was a big hit for a time, in the way only the stars-aligned combo of a cool obscure indie game and a rogue blog post could accomplish back in 2011 (this other interview is a nice time capsule of that). In 2017, Locke recoded the game and added the ability to just play it in your browser. And it’s still there, lingering, waiting to be experienced. Because sometimes, you just feel like passing through those curtains…