You never thought you'd read about a game in 2020 that bears the name of the deprecated multimedia platform Macromedia Flash.

Mackerelmedia Fish is the latest title from indie designer Nathalie Lawhead, in which you play as an Internet archaeologist exploring a crumbling website. Hidden among them are mini-games and a big fish to find. There are also rats eating pieces of old web code and an ingenious error 404 dead end... Part Frog Fractions, part Hypnospace Outlaw, Lawhead calls it "somewhere between an ARG, graphic novel and text adventure kind of thing."

It is definitely a text adventure.

I had Mackerelmedia Fish open in a separate tab at work, so I lurked at will and discovered something like a downloadable "Electric Love Potato" desktop buddy to keep me from falling into darkness. It's a hilarious window back to the days before social media, when there were lots of more colorful, amateurish personal sites and everything felt friendlier online.

Mackerelmedia Fish can be played here; Lawhead is also responsible for Everything is Going to Be OK and contributes to the PC Gamer Indie zine.