At heart, it seems a fairly basic game. You have to find someone to give you a lift home because you're not in a fit state to drive yourself. Probably happened to all of us at some point or other, but I bet it's never been quite the same as in this game.

The first part of Blue Chairs - I'm not entirely sure what the title refers to - takes place at a party. You wander around from one location to the next and try to piece together what you need to do to get home. It's not simply a case of finding your car and driving off as you've been boxed in by other cars. (There's also the fact that you're high on drugs at the time and so it's probably just as well that you can't drive off.) The location descriptions are littered with swear words but nicely written all the same and somehow don't seem anywhere near as offensive as they otherwise would. On the downside, they also often lack proper descriptive text for the locations you find yourself in but due to the way the game plays out, this is a fault you can easily forgive. At times it's like reading the diary entries of someone with a seriously disturbed mind.

There is a lot of strangeness on offer here, some of it quite inspired. I found the conversation with the person who wasn't there in the bathroom chilling. Was I really talking to myself? Or was there someone there who disappeared when I opened the door? Or, more likely, were the drugs just playing with my mind? The telephone call with Beatrice (my girlfriend or wife I'm guessing) in which my only response is "uuuuuu" to reflect my current state is another nice touch. Elsewhere in the game, after considerable effort, I managed to discover that what had originally appeared to be a pole was in fact some guy in a kind of daze. A helpful guy, fortunately, who I even managed to persuade to drive me home despite the fact that I'd only just met him.

Weird? Yes. Good? Hell yes.

I can well imagine the strangness of the game turning people off and I have to admit that the idea to simply quit crossed my mind a couple of times not longer after I'd started playing. But no matter how downright weird the game gets (and it does get downright weird quite a few times) it's always a very interesting game to play with surprises around the corner just waiting for you to stumble across them. Although not all of the surprises are welcome ones. The switch from the drugged up guy at the party to the President threw me and then the subsequent puzzle of finding the signs and putting them in the right holes just struck me as a notoriously tedious puzzle. A writer trying too hard to get a little extra bizarreness into his game? Perhaps.

I played Blue Chairs towards the end of the games in this year's IFComp and to find a well written and thoughtful game (albeit stranger than most) was a refreshing change after the bug ridden messes I had recently trawled my way through. It's not a perfect game but I'll certainly say it kept me interested for as long as was required to finish it.

7 out of 10