There is nothing quite like Sleep Is Death. The idea is still as fresh as it was twelve years ago. When it came out, it was popular for a short while, but GMs were always in short supply. It took commitment to prepare the story, assets, and anticipate various choices player could make. Not many people went through the effort to learn the UI to create content in real time for players.

The currently ongoing Jason Rohrer's project "One hour one life" feels like evolution of this dynamic between player and the GM. The author is now a sole GM, he keeps track of community needs and wants. Every now and then the author creates new content (items, recipes, mechanics), which takes the in-game civilization a step further. The game is worth checking out, it has a quite innovative design.

I can't believe I missed that, would love to have known it during it's heydays and experienced it with good GMs

Is Jason still making content for One Hour One Life? The game is amazing, but he seemed to have lost interest.

All of his games are open source though, and there are forks.

Got some links to the forks? Would be interested to check them out.

Two Hours One Life: https://twohoursonelife.com/

You Are Hope: https://dualdecade.com/

This and Jason Rohrer's other games are all in the public domain and have source code available. The code is mostly on GitHub these days, but some of it may not have moved yet. His recent games have all be multiplayer of some variety, but personally I liked Cultivation (gardening community) and Primrose (puzzle) the most.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ https://github.com/jasonrohrer https://sourceforge.net/projects/hcsoftware/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/minorGems/

I had some really good moments playing this when it came out.

More recently during lockdown, over the course of 4/5 months I would hang out on zoom with a friend for an hour or so once a fortnight while we very relaxedly assembled a scenario from scratch (rather than with built-in assets) for each other (without disclosing contents, more just catching up about IRL stuff and sharing tips about how to use the editors in the game). Then, when our scenarios were ready, we took a night each to play through our scenarios - it took maybe like 20 minutes or so a piece. It was a nice slow build-up and overall a good exercise :) (Though my scenario was kinda badly misjudged in some aspects that made it quite embarrassing for me, I guess that's a risk with personalised improv... . I don't regret the activity as a whole :) ).

[We did increase the time-limit for turns a bit - the default time-limit is very punishing if you aren't fluent with the interface or have fat fingers or whatever]

I'm slightly sad there aren't more things in the same genre :)

I played this back then and it was really fun, people made Murder Mystery style levels so you would go from scene to scene and have to put the clues together.

It'd be fantastic if it supported more players and had more tools to help the GM.

Can someone say where to find regular curation and reviews of games like this?

I don't have time for most computer games (no criticism of them, I just spend my limited time elsewhere). I'd like to discover real art in games - not in the visuals, in the medium, in games that transcend the genre. The game equivelent of exceptional art-house movies. Where can I discover them?

All of Jason Rohrer's games are art:

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/

This is a terrible website that tells you nothing about the game. What's it like? How does it play? Screenshots or videos?

Try this link from that page: http://www.sleepisdeath.net/slideShow/

I'll have to look at it from a computer later. Too small on a phone.

It's some sort of isometric game with speech bubbles, but what is the basic gameplay?

One player controls the main character. The other player takes the role of DM and responds to the player's actions by controlling everything (literally everything) else.

Thank you. I wish they included that basic description on the home page.

Does anyone know of a more modern game in the same vein?

Maybe try building from source? The code is here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/SleepIsDeath

The latest SleepIsDeath isn't compatible with the latest minorGems code unfortunately, so you might need to make some modifications.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/minorGems

The build process is like this:

  clone both repos
  cd SleepIsDeath
  ./configure
  make -C gameSource

Maybe Neverwinter Nights in its DM mode? I think there were a few new entries in the virtual tabletop space recently, but I forget what they're called.

GM mode for Divinity: The original sin 2 gets a lot of praise

Can someone explain how the game works?

Here is a review: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-02-05-sleep-is-death...