The Trail of Anguish is a loose prequel to Andrew Walters's earlier sci-fi adventure game The Perils of Akumos. Loose in that though the games share a universe, this one has a totally different setting and tone. It takes place on a college campus, where you play a student hunting down a crazed killer. In all the time when you're not dealing with this allegedly deadly threat, you're just doing a series of college activities, varying from bizarre tasks for professors to just eating and sleeping.
The game's available online through Rinkworks.
Tropes used in The Trail of Anguish include:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer - Not just big enough to walk through but big enough to build and fly a hovercraft through.
- Eating Lunch Alone: You have to do this. Eating the food turns out to be its own challenge.
- Fish Out of Temporal Water - If you believe the dinner presentation, this explains Silas and Verna's confusion.
- Hero of Another Story: Chris is on an adventure of his own, complete with a ridiculous inventory. He claims that everyone is one some sort of adventure.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Spoofed with Chris - you question the ability to bring your large inventory on your date; he reveals a bicycle he's been carrying without your noticing.
- Nobody Poops: If you try, the game informs you that you don't need to because "this is an adventure game after all."
- Jerk Jock: A gang of them, who chase nerds because, maybe, they think they're still in high school?
- Sequel Hook: There's a rather sudden one, leaving your character's fate unknown. The sequel is still promised, but it's been more than a decade...
- Starving Student: You're poverty confines you to a shabby dorm, and you can't afford clothes.
- Trapped in Another World: Silas and Verna, in yours. Then, in the closing scene, the tables turn, and YOU're trapped in another world.
- Twenty Minutes in The Future: It takes place in 2073, but other than a futuristic car, the setting departs little from a contemporary one.
- Wacky College: Of the "mad, disturbing professors" variety.