Alt+Escape: I Can Hold My Breath Forever

Welcome to Alt+Escape, our weekly pick of browser-based games to help you start your weekend a little early. Check back each Friday for a new game!

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I Can Hold My Breath Forever

Games like Dead Space and Silent Hill purport to be frightening, but this "fear" pales in comparison to the sheer and utter terror induced by one single piece of videogame music: Sonic's drowning theme. Your life was now on a very, very short timer and if you didn't find air right that second, you were a goner.

That's kind of what I Can Hold My Breath Forever is like. Some time ago, your dear friend jumped into a pond (that's really more like an underwater maze) and you followed him. Your friend has left you notes hidden in pockets of air, and your task is to move from cavern to cavern to track him down. The catch is that you can only hold your breath for ten seconds before you die, and there's no time for hesitation - you need to move, and move quickly or else your time will run out.

The result is a strange game with all the trappings of an "art game" - the music is soothing, the story is pieced together through fond notes from an old friend, and the graphics are charitably 4-bit - but that manages to be bizarrely intense nonetheless.

Developed by Jake Elliot, Breath was made for the Experimental Gameplay Project.