Long Distance Coughing

Long Distance Coughing is a humorous Full Motion Video (FMV)-based adventure game where a hypochondriac, trapped in the basement of his contemporary apartment building, attempts to escape while uncovering a bizarre plot involving medicine and murder. Featuring puzzle elements and graphic adventure gameplay, this comedic detective mystery won 2nd place in the 2020 Adventure Jam contest.

Long Distance Coughing: A Review

1. Introduction: A Cough in the Dark

In the landscape of 2020’s independent adventure game scene, a particular title emerged not from a sprawling studio roadmap but from the crucible of a game jam. Long Distance Coughing is that intriguing anomaly: a Full Motion Video (FMV) adventure that winks at the genre’s legacy while carving out a niche defined by absurdist comedy and claustrophobic mystery. Its premise—a hypochondriac locked in a basement, uncovering a plot of “medicine and murder”—promises a tense thriller, yet the game’s reputation, forged in the fires of the 2020 Adventure Jam where it secured a respectable second place, is built on humor. This review will argue that Long Distance Coughing is not merely a comedic diversion but a clever, self-aware deconstruction of the very FMV and adventure game conventions it employs. It uses its inherent limitations—a single, grimy setting, live-action performances, and a jam-built scope—to deliver a tightly focused satire on paranoia, medical anxiety, and the absurdity of amateur detective work, securing its place as a cult footnote in the modern FMV revival.

2. Development History & Context: Born from Jam Constraints

Long Distance Coughing was developed for and released in 2020, notably placing it within a vibrant year for indie adventure games, as highlighted by community roundups like the Reddit post from r/adventuregames. Its most critical credential is winning 2nd place in the 2020 Adventure Jam contest. This context is paramount. Game jams impose extreme constraints: limited time (often a weekend or a few weeks), tiny or solo teams, and minimal resources. This explains the game’s fundamental design choices:
* The Single Location: The entire game is confined to a basement. This is a classic jam constraint—building and rendering one environment is vastly more feasible than a sprawling world. In Long Distance Coughing, this constraint becomes a thematic strength, amplifying the protagonist’s hypochondria and entrapment.
* FMV as a Practical & Aesthetic Choice: FMV, the dominant form of adventure game storytelling in the 1990s (with titles like Phantasmagoria or The 7th Guest), fell out of favor due to high costs of filming, acting, and storage. For a jam team, pre-rendered 3D or hand-drawn art might be equally time-consuming, but shooting a few scenes with a consumer camera in a single location is a viable, low-budget alternative. The game thus exists as part of the broader “FMV revival” trend in indie games (seen in titles like The Bunker or Dark Side of the Moon: A Captain Disaster Adventure), but with the rough, charming, and often intentionally cheap aesthetic that jam development produces.
* The 2020 Indie Adventure Landscape: The game was released amid a surge of acclaimed indie adventures—from the hand-animated The Hand of Glory and Chicken Police to the atmospheric ROKI and VirtuaVerse. In this crowded field, Long Distance Coughing stood out in community lists specifically under “comedy releases” and as a “free game” jam standout, indicating its primary value was seen in its humor and efficiency rather than its production polish or length.

3. Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: Paranoia in the Pilot Light

The game’s description provides the narrative skeleton: a hypochondriac protagonist becomes locked in his apartment building’s basement and discovers a bizarre plot involving medicine and murder. The stated contradiction—that a theme sounding “serious” results in a “fairly humorous” game—is where the narrative’s genius lies. It operates on two parallel tracks:

A. The Absurdist Detective Plot:
The plot is a classic, almost archetypal, adventure game mystery: isolation, a hidden conspiracy, clues to gather, and a need to escape. The “medicine and murder” angle immediately evokes medical thrillers or cozy mysteries gone wrong. However, the protagonist’s hypochondria refracts this through a lens of escalating, irrational fear. Every mundane basement object—a rusty pipe, a dusty can, a strange stain—becomes a potential vector for disease or a clue to foul play. The narrative structure likely follows a point-and-click progression: the player must examine items, combine them, and use them on the environment or (potentially) on other FMV characters (other residents? the landlord? a sinister doctor?) to progress upward and outward from the basement. The humor stems from the dissonance between the protagonist’s paranoid internal monologue (likely delivered via title cards or voiceover) and the probably mundane, if grimy, reality of his surroundings.

B. Deconstructing Genre & Anxiety:
Long Distance Coughing uses its framework to satirize two things:
1. The FMV Adventure Genre: The genre is famous for corny acting, low-budget sets, and convoluted puzzles. The game’s basement setting is the ultimate low-budget set. The hypochondriac’s melodramatic reactions to the environment mirror the overdramatic acting common in FMV games. The puzzles likely involve nonsensical combinations (e.g., “use cough syrup on the fuse box to conduct electricity”) that parody the genre’s often illogical puzzle design.
2. Modern Health Anxiety: In an era of WebMD hypochondria and pandemic-induced sanitization, the game taps into a relatable, modern anxiety. The basement—a space associated with mold, dust, spiders, and utility hazards—is the perfect petri dish for such fears. The “medicine” in the plot could be intercepted prescriptions, mysterious pills, or toxic chemicals, playing on fears of contamination and medical malfeasance. The comedy arises from taking this genuine anxiety to its logical, hilarious extreme within a game context.

Themes of isolation, mistrust, and the search for control are present but consistently undercut by comedy. You are not a hero; you are a very sick man in a very dirty room trying to stop a cough.

4. Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Jam-Built Engine

As a jam game and an FMV adventure, its mechanics are necessarily simple and functional:
* Core Loop: Point-and-Click Interaction with static or short, looping FMV backgrounds. The player moves a cursor (the classic adventure game “hand” or “pointer”) to hotspots: objects on shelves, cracks in walls, doors, windows, perhaps other people filmed on a green screen and composited into the basement set.
* Inventory & Puzzles: The primary system is an inventory where collected items (a hammer, a key, a piece of paper with a number, a medicinal bottle) are stored. Puzzles are environmental and combinatorial: finding hidden items, using the right item on the right hotspot, and potentially engaging in dialogue trees if other characters appear (via FMV). The puzzles are designed to be logical within the game’s absurdist world—the solution to a lock might involve remembering a cough syrup dosage mentioned earlier, tying the medical theme directly into progression.
* UI & Innovation: The UI is standard for the genre: a verb-like menu (Look, Take, Use) or a context-sensitive cursor. There is no “innovative” system here; the innovation is in the conceptual marriage of a single-room FMV format with a narrative about claustrophobia and hypochondria. The constraint is the design.
* Flaws (By Design or Necessity?): Given its jam origins, potential flaws are evident: limited interactivity (only so many hotspots in one room), repetitive FMV loops (a character coughing in the corner), potentially obtuse puzzle logic (a staple of the genre, amplified by the quirky theme), and a short playtime (likely 30 minutes to 2 hours). These are not necessarily criticisms but inherent traits of the format, which the game leans into for comedic effect.

5. World-Building, Art & Sound: The Gritty Basement Aesthetic

Long Distance Coughing’s world is its contemporary, grimy apartment building basement. This is not a cyberpunk dystopia or a fantastical realm; it is a place of universal, low-grade dread.
* Art Direction: The Full Motion Video art is the defining feature. It will use live-action actors on a low-budget set. The visual style is therefore foundational realism meets video cassette quality. The basement is likely cluttered with laundry machines, storage boxes, pipes, and cobwebs. The “art” is in the casting and framing. The protagonist’s costume (maybe a worn robe, glassy eyes) immediately sells the hypochondriac. The “bizarre plot” elements are suggested through props (unlabeled medicine bottles, bloody rags, cryptic notes) rather than grand visuals. The charm lies in its unpolished, tangible reality—a direct contrast to the sleek 3D worlds of modern gaming.
* Atmosphere & Sound Design: The atmosphere is built through sound. The constant, distant hum of a furnace or refrigerator. The drip-drip of a leak. The protagonist’s own coughing, a central audio motif that escalates in panic. Tense, minimalist music or complete silence punctuated by sudden, comedic stingers when a “clue” is found. The sound design makes the single location feel alive, threatening, and deeply unsettling—a perfect canvas for the protagonist’s imagination to run wild. The FMV has no voice acting budget? Then title cards or the protagonist’s internal voice (a la Grim Fandango‘s Manny) deliver the humor and exposition.

6. Reception & Legacy: The Jam Darling That Resonated

Long Distance Coughing exists in a unique reception space:
* Critical Reception: It has no formal critic reviews on aggregators like MobyGames (the field is empty). This is typical for a jam game. Its “reviews” are community-based. Its inclusion in the Reddit “2020 – The Year in Adventure Gaming” roundup is its most significant critical accolade. Being listed alongside major releases like The Hand of Glory and Beyond a Steel Sky as a “standout” from Advjam2020 (the source mentions “Long Distance Coughing, and The Creator is Mean were some standouts from the Advjam2020”) is a testament to its perceived quality within its niche. Players and fellow developers recognized it as a game that exceeded the expectations of its format.
* Commercial Success: As a free or very low-cost jam game, commercial metrics are irrelevant. Its “collection” by only 1 player on MobyGames speaks to its extremely niche, underground status.
* Legacy & Influence: Its legacy is not one of mass influence but of proof-of-concept. It demonstrates that the FMV genre, even with the most minimal resources and a single, inexpensive location, can be used for smart, thematic comedy. It joins the ranks of other “jam breakout” adventures that find an audience through word-of-mouth and community curation (e.g., Hiveswap Act II, Swarm of the Plague Babies). It reinforces the 2020s indie adventure scene’s capacity for high-concept, low-budget execution. Its true influence might be in inspiring other solo or duo devs to consider FMV not as a retro novelty, but as a viable, cost-effective storytelling medium for tightly scoped, character-driven stories.

7. Conclusion: A Cough That Echoes

Long Distance Coughing is not a game you stumble upon on a Steam front page. It is a game you are told about by a trusted friend who frequents adventure game forums or jam compilations. It is a deliberately small, sharp, and witty piece of interactive theater. Its brilliance is not in grand scale but in the alchemy of constraint and concept: using the limitations of a game jam (one room, FMV, short development) to perfectly mirror the psychological constraints of its hypochondriac protagonist.

The game succeeds because it understands its genres—both the FMV adventure and the medical thriller—only to lovingly parody them. The basement becomes a metaphor for the mind, where every shadow holds a conspiracy and every cough is a symptom of doom. It asks the player to engage not with epic stakes, but with the very real, very human experience of irrational fear, making the resolution—whatever escape it provides—feel strangely cathartic.

In the pantheon of best video game stories, as listed by outlets like Den of Geek, Long Distance Coughing will not appear. Its story is not about saving the world or exploring profound existential themes. But in the specialized canon of ingenious indie FMV experiments and game jam triumphs, it holds a distinguished place. It is a reminder that great game design often lies not in the scale of the world, but in the precision of the joke, the cleverness of the puzzle, and the confidence to let a single, cough-filled basement tell a complete, hilarious, and surprisingly resonant story.

Final Verdict: 4 out of 5 Hypochondriac Hysteria
A masterclass in jam-developed comedy and FMV minimalism. Its legacy is secure as a cult favorite that proves you don’t need a budget to build a perfectly pitched, thematically coherent, and deeply funny adventure. Seek it out for a potent, 90-minute dose of genre-savvy laughter.