Mezzanine

Mezzanine is a first-person point-and-click adventure that traces the origin of the modern web and takes you into the heart of San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch on the eve of Y2K. The player assumes the mantle of an HR admin working late into the night at Zentropy, a buzzy up-and-coming multimedia startup. The game is ostensibly an office simulator; you can read emails, send layoff notices, drop off reports, and make coffee. In the process, you may encounter hidden puzzles and uncover sordid details about the company and its operations. But beyond this ludic veneer, Mezzanine is a reification, a summoning of the fallen world of the Gulch, an era where there was still, apparently, a future. Now, the promises of multimedia and the internet have resulted in widespread alienation, anxiety, dissociation, severe wealth inequality, and colossal levels of psychiatric medication prescriptions. As a forged artifact, whose very form evokes Myst and what was once considered the bleeding edge, Mezzanine explores the lost potential of multimedia and how our current societal psychosis may have always been by design.