Shade

Shade wasn't my first experience with interactive fiction, but it was the first time I became aware of IF as a genre. I had played similar games before, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but didn't conceptualize how in depth and nuanced they could be until Shade.

As for the game itself, I thought it played on the concept of an unexamined life not worth living. The main character seems to be living a depressing, meaningless existence, and fails to comprehend the last seconds of his own life.

The hallucinations he goes through where everything turns to sand, remind me of the the last few seconds of a dream, where you incorporate the real world into a dream. Alarm clocks become sirens, and a radio playing could become a live band.

In Greek culture, the idea of a shade is an entity which is between this life and the next, and isn't aware of their predicament. This is a very Sixth Sense twist and makes this story compelling.