The Odyssey adventure game from 2012 is the perfect preview for Nolan's film

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens this weekend, but with IMAX seats already sold out, one writer decided to preview the film by playing the 2012 mobile point-and-click adventure game of the same name — developed by Crazysoft and ported to Steam in 2016. The experiment: play it for exactly two hours and 53 minutes, the runtime of Nolan's film, and see if the game's blueprint maps onto what audiences can expect from Matt Damon's Odysseus.

The game starts where the poem does — Odysseus stranded on Calypso's island, waiting for Hermes to talk her into letting him go. From there, the player has to build a raft, which sounds simple until the game reveals itself as a relentless pixel hunt. Finding a single branch on a tree requires clicking every square inch of bark because it blends in completely with the rest of the sprite. Using an axe on the tree does nothing until that branch is collected first — the kind of adventure-game logic that feels arbitrary until, suddenly, it isn't. The loom puzzle is the low point: Calypso explains that only one handle and one pedal need to be pressed, but won't say which ones. After already having clicked around randomly, the player has no idea what state the loom is in, so the only option is to try every possible combination until something works. Matt Damon, presumably, will do the same on the big screen. The raft itself requires two long pieces of sturdy wood that turn out to come from the loom — meaning Odysseus dismantles his captor's only loom to escape her island, which is both rude and very on-brand for the character.

Crazysoft's The Odyssey is a fairly obscure mobile-era adventure game, the kind that flooded app stores in the early 2010s before being quietly ported to Steam years later. Point-and-click adventures have a long tradition of obtuse puzzle design — the genre's golden age in the 1990s produced both beloved classics and notorious moon-logic nightmares — and this game sits firmly in the latter camp. Nolan's film, by contrast, is one of the most anticipated releases of the year, shot on IMAX film with a cast that includes Matt Damon, and based on Homer's epic that has been adapted into everything from animated films to video games for decades.

Whether the film follows the game's blueprint — wandering back and forth between a cave and a beach, using a handful of mud on every object in reach — remains to be seen. But if it does, audiences should budget extra time for the bathroom break, because hour one alone is going to be a lot of loom.