Cascade Failure
We're almost at the end. The signs are everywhere, now. In your prediction models, in your dreams, in the whispered conversations of the false-people in the street. The end of the world is coming.
Cascade Failure is set in the dystopian future of 2007, and is about a desperate last-ditch effort to stave off the apocalypse.
[ ABOUT ]
Laura Roberts 🦎, cyber-witch and star of Icebound Machines and Parsinomady, returns for her latest adventure. (You don't need to have played those.) She approaches the apocalypse with a great deal of dread. She approaches everything with a great deal of dread. But she is perhaps the only person in the world who can see reality for what it is. Armed with a laptop and a book of experimental magic, she's ready to do what she can. The Septober 2006 issue of Abenteuer Heute Abend described her as "one of gaming's most anxious lizard wizards," so you know you're in for a time.
Cascade Failure was a Commercial Failure as well, and it was thought lost media for nearly two decades. But a creepy man at a garage sale gave us an almost-complete demo copy of it, and our finest preservationists have gotten it into to a playable state. Remember, though - this is from 2006! Expect some jank.
Content notes: Violence, societal decay, disease, teeth, social isolation, loss of reality. Furries. Well, scalies, I guess.
(If you're not going to be playing the browser version, please see the "how do I play this" section below.)
[ DETAILS ]
What is this?
This game isn't actually from 2006. Instead, I made it within a week in October 2025, as a game jam entry. (Chiefly for Scream Jam 2025 and for Themed Horror Game Jam 22.) But it could have been made in 2006, as it uses tools that were available then - specifically, Adventure Game Studio 2.72, from August of that year."Retro horror" games often use the aesthetics of an era, but you can always tell imitations from the real thing. In cases where games are actually developed to target a specific platform, those platforms tend to be consoles. (Like some of the deeply impressive "haunted PSX game" sub-genre.) So, I figured... why not make something like that, but for a PC from the mid-2000s? I fired up my Windows XP VM and got to work. (I might write more about that later, if it's of interest.)
How do the controls work?
The whole game is controlled by left-clicking. Click on blank space, Laura walks there. Click on a verb and then a hotspot or character or object, Laura does her thing. You left-click to advance dialogue and you left-click to select options. You can also right-click on something to trigger the Examine interaction. If nothing seems to happen, you may have forgotten to select the verb first. (I admit this is a little janky, but the status line will reliably update with your verb.)How do I play this?
Remember, this game is from 2006, sort of. Getting some lost media project to work is half the fun. That being said, I know not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, so here are some pointers.- On the web, everything should just work. It looks fine in Firefox and Chrome. uses Érico Porto's astonishing AGSJS toolset to run the old AGS 2.72 executable. I am not aware of any issues with this.
- The Linux build ships with the official runtime, which also works well. (That's why the download is so big. Fifteen megs!) Just run the included script and you're good. You can also run the executable in WINE.
- But Windows is very fussy. You can run the executable directly, but please do so in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode and for the love of starlight do not use fullscreen mode. Performance will still be middling.
- I actually recommend running it through ScummVM instead. It won't let you load it directly, but you can drag-and-drop the executable file (caf.exe) into the window. It'll complain, but the AGS Fallback configuration will run the game, and do so quite smoothly.
- Any platform for which a ScummVM build exists should be able to run the game through that.
Extra credits
Due to engine restrictions I can't just put links into the game, so they're listed again here.- The game is built in (a long-obsolete version of) Adventure Game Studio and is based on the OpenQuest project.
- All the music is by human gazpacho under a CC-BY licence. The specific tracks are
- Visual assets used:
- PH64 Pixel Pack by PurpleHeart,
- City Mega Pack by GrafxKid,
- Junkyard by Galacti-Chron,
- Living Tissue Platform Tileset by ansimuz,
- NBP Informa by FontGeek,
- Gore Blood Gibs Meat Chunks by Reactorcore,
- and PPC by ShatteredReality.
Download
Install instructions
Probably just play this in the browser instead.
The Windows version must be run in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3, and must not be run in full-screen mode. The recommended way to play it is through ScummVM. (Drag and drop the caf.exe file into the window, and ignore the warning that pops up.)
The Linux version ships with a runtime, which lets it run much more smoothly. You can also just play the thing through WINE.
Other platforms can download the Windows archive and try to run the game through ScummVM.
Comments
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Darn cool. I hope you do write more on the development part of it later, like you mentioned.
That's definitely the elephant in the room when it comes to these PS1/N64 era retro attempts, or meta "cursed" games. Though it's much much harder to actually 1 to 1 emulate the software and how those games were actually made, especially as a solo dev. Though I absolutely do not fault devs for using modern software to make those, since it's the most practical way, even if the actual software of the era adds a great deal of soul to it.
pretty damn good, im glad we got to see what happened to laura after parsinomady and before icebound
The Laura Roberts saga still doesn't disappoint, and going retro was a pretty interesting decision