We took advantage of yesterday’s Twitter outage to catch up with some of our too-long-neglected reading—once we’d finished Lev Grossman‘s The Magicians, we picked up the ARC of Isis, a Douglas Clegg novella coming this fall from Vanguard Press. It’s a rather unsettling tale of the supernatural in an old-school mode—think “The Monkey’s Paw” or The Other—and not the sort of story that lends itself readily to a video game adaptation.
And yet… FlashGameLicense.com has taken Glenn Chadbourne‘s illustrations, which appear throughout the published book, and used them as the basis for a flash game they intend to distribute on various online gaming sites, along with a free version for the iPhone. Instead of playing as the story’s narrator (boy, would that make for a glum gaming experience!), users are shown side-by-side pictures, taken from the book, and tasked with spotting the differences between one version and the other. Developer Ecky Oesjady used a pale palette to colorize Chadbourne’s original ink drawings; the latter artist declares himself “delighted” by the results: “The tones, hues and overall color scheme add a wonderful moody, broody, feel to the book’s atmosphere,” he says in a press release announcing the game’s imminent release. “Very well done. I couldn’t be happier.”