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Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

One measure of how hard you've fallen for a game is the extent to which you'll overengineer solutions to its puzzles, out of sheer giddiness. So it was with Counterfeit Monkey's letter remover—a sort of linguistic edition of the sonic screwdriver. First I pulled a "chard" from its roots in a garden, and removed its "h", transforming the vegetable into a "card". Then I deleted the "r", causing a sputtering, ramshackle yet functioning "car" to spring into being in its place.

From a piece of "garbage", I magicked an entire "garage" out of nowhere, replete with a somewhat bemused mechanic—who pointed out that my vehicle needed fuel. And with a sprig of "sage" and the use of a mirror, I eventually managed to reverse the nature of an object and wind up with "gas" for the car. I was a wizard of words, disrupting the fabric of reality with my mastery of language.

(Image credit: Emily Short)

Counterfeit Monkey is a text adventure. To be specific, it's a parser game—one of those where you type in commands to tell your character to GO NORTH or PICK UP CHARD.

While it's just about feasible to imagine Counterfeit Monkey as a point-and-click puzzler—and there's a certain amount of LucasArts spirit powering its absurdist conundrums—adding graphics would rather miss the point. This unique game is an exploration of the meaning we attach to words. It respects the symbolic weight of writing on a page. In many ways, Counterfeit Monkey celebrates the power of our brains to interpret a series of jumbled letters as vivid images, to assemble scenes and action and plot-twists from white squiggles on a black background.

It might all sound a bit lofty and unapproachable. But Counterfeit Monkey is composed with the immediacy and electricity of an espionage thriller. It casts you out onto the street as a wanted individual, and tasks you with finding your way off the island of Atlantis. Which, in a strange way, is a pretty oppressive place. In a world where words can be weaponised, the Atlanteans have established their dominance by stranglehold: banning the use of any language that isn't English, in an effort to reduce the public's ability to transform objects.