Discolored, by Jason Godbey, is a 2019 first-person puzzle game set in an empty roadside diner in the middle of the desert as the dead of night approaches. All the color has been drained out of the world, and you are an agent of an unspecified agency dedicated to getting the color back – allegedly. It’s never really made clear, as Discolored is solely focused on this diner and little else in the way of explicit worldbuilding.
You are transported to the diner via a possibly-magical reel viewer and set loose into the monochrome wasteland, where you are free to begin your investigation immediately. (If you have the feature enabled, that reel viewer can also provide visual hints as to where to go and what to do.)
Initially, you’re left to sort of just wander around the diner grounds, unable to go too far out into the desert thanks to the “wormhole” effect that simply reloads you into the level on the opposite end from where you tried to exit. Eventually, you will stumble on the first items you can interact with, and it honestly doesn’t take much to figure out what to do once you’ve taken/interacted with those items. (Why you’re doing said task isn’t immediately apparent at all, and unless you use a hint you don’t get an explicit directive.)
Without spoiling too much, your task at first is to find three colored prisms and place them strategically throughout the diner; this is what restores the color to the world and allows you to finish previously hidden puzzles. Nothing is super difficult or irreversible, though, so even if you get stuck you can get unstuck fairly swiftly, and since you’re limited to the diner, running back and forth from prism to prism is a much more bearable chore than it would be if you had to cross wide empty valleys or massive sprawling complexes or something. When the twist happens, you basically do it all again, but, well, differently.
Discolored was a good way to spend 90 minutes, a pleasant and unchallenging romp through a setting that stands apart as one of my favorite types of liminal space. It’s got the barest hints of other, more challenging and spookier games, like Myst or Resident Evil, but claims no pretense to be either. It’s like the La Croix version of those games, but much more interesting than any La Croix flavor ever could be. Check it out on Apple Arcade and Steam.
