Kotel Quest

Kotel Quest is a short adventure game set in the Old City of Jerusalem, built to look like a console from 1993 and to feel like a Tuesday afternoon in the shuk.

The plan is simple. Walk to the Kotel, put your note in the wall, walk back. You come through Jaffa Gate, take one turn into the alleys, and lose all sense of direction inside a minute.

There is no map and no waypoint marker. What there is, in every doorway and on every corner, is people — and people in Jerusalem will always help you, at length, with digressions.

For fifteen minutes the city does not let up. You are fed, blessed, hustled, corrected, sold a rug you cannot carry, and handed directions you cannot use by four people in a row who are each certain and each different.

Then you come round the last corner, and it stops.

That contrast is the whole game. Everything loud is there to set up the thing that is quiet, which arrives without a fanfare and asks nothing of you. Most people walk it in about fifteen minutes. Most people then sit through the ending twice.

Thirty-one people, each with something specific to say, drawn from the actual population of that square kilometre on an ordinary day.

A man selling bootleg t-shirts who will go to eighty for three. Samir with the knafeh from Nablus. A juice vendor who will tell you a pomegranate holds six hundred and thirteen seeds. A procession carrying a cross along the Via Dolorosa. A tour guide counting twenty-nine red hats from Seoul. Birthright kids on day six, running on nine hours of sleep. Soldiers at the bag check. A Chabadnik with a folding table who would like ninety seconds of your arm. Two clean-cut young men who have just one quick question, and a dinner, and a class after the dinner.

And four people asking you for tzedaka, of whom two genuinely need it. Telling them apart is the only real judgement the game asks of you. It notices what you decide and it keeps score, though it never once tells you off.

The game asks you two things at the beginning. One quietly decides how it ends. The other is a joke, right up until it isn't.

No Hebrew, no history, no religious background, no prior visit. Every word you need is explained on the spot by somebody who is delighted to explain it to you.

If you have walked the Old City, you will recognise the corner where the light changes and the exact tone of a man insisting the shop is closing anyway. If you never have, this is fifteen minutes inside it, made with real affection for the place and for everyone crowded into it.

There is no fail state. Nothing chases you, no timer is counting down, and the only way to lose is to stop walking. It is safe to hand to a parent or to a child, and it takes about as long as a coffee.

You round a corner, the alley opens out, and the wall is enormous in front of you. Courses of pale stone running up out of frame, greenery in the joints, folded paper pressed into every crack that will take it.

What happens next takes the controls out of your hands for a few minutes. You can sit with it as long as you like, and close the summary to keep watching. We are not going to spoil it here, and neither should whoever sent you this.