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DELRON
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Lockdown
Author: Richard Otter
Date: 2015
Inform 7/Gluxe
Story: The protagonist is a janitor at a
Science! institute; when play begins, he has just locked the base down and then
murdered everyone inside it. The actual game involves him walking around the
base and figuring out how to mess up the experiment in order to explode
everything.
I think this is aiming to be a psychological thriller, but it doesn’t have quite
enough going on in either department.
On the psychological drama side, this is a story about a mass shooting/suicide,
told from the perspective of the shooter. The shooter has serious mental health
problems and a great deal of resentment, and uncovering this is a major focus of
the game. Most of this doesn’t add much to ‘serious mental health problems and a
great deal of resentment’, though. On encountering the dead bodies of his former
co-workers, we get a little information about how he didn’t like them.
The media res opening suggests that it might be intended as that venerable old
saw of psychological thrillers, the Dreadful Past Conveniently Obscured by
Amnesia, but – thankfully – this turns out to just be the effect of the player’s
limited knowledge, rather than the protagonist’s.
And on the thriller side, there’s kind of a lack of thrills. You’re fortified
inside a base, with The Authorities hammering on the door – that’s a reliable
premise for building tension over the course of a story, but beyond its initial
introduction, it’s basically ignored. You have an objective at the outset of the
story, and advance steadily towards that objective until you accomplish it.
That’s OK for gameplay purposes, kinda, but really bad for story.
The story isn’t hugely interested in the SF part either; we never really learn
what the science guys are studying or why. The parts you can interact with are
all rather pulpy: Big Machine With Buttons, Huge Shiny Crystal – but the
overactive enthusiasm and melodrama that I generally take as hallmarks of
self-conscious science pulp are absent. The principal reason to situate the
action in a science base, rather than in any other workplace, is so that puzzles
are required to complete the action.
2.
Writing:
You speed read the document which is your annual appraisal written by John
Myers. Although the document does mention your overall performance it seems to
be mainly be about your mental stability. A number of lines stand out,
“prolonged depression”, “strong feelings of anger”, “delusions and
hallucinations”, “inability to cope with daily problems and activities”, “denial
of obvious problems”, “suicidal thoughts” and so on.
One further section catches your eye. “Williams has a habit of introducing
himself as a Junior Technician and has stopped wearing his Maintenance badge.”
This kind of verges out of the normal territory of an appraisal and into a
psychiatric report – the language is largely about the PC’s internal states,
which you don’t really care about if you’re seeking justifications to fire
someone – but in writing terms, the problem is that it’s a big old violation of
Show Don’t Tell. I was put in mind of an old Adam Cadre review of Kim Stanley
Robinson’s approach to characterisation and worldbuilding:
To a great extent, the purpose of narrative is to explore people’s psychological
makeup. We follow characters around and watch what they do, what decisions they
make, and come to understand what makes them tick. This process is entirely
short-circuited by having a character sit down in a chair and say, “Here’s what
makes me tick, doc.”
The symptoms and behaviours described don’t form an implausible background for a
mass shooter, but at the end of it you don’t feel as though you know Peter
Williams much more deeply than the police report and news articles that’ll come
out in the aftermath. Fiction’s great strength is its ability to go beyond what
an outsider could reasonably know, to go beyond the general to the
acutely-personal specifics. Without that, it’s just non-fiction without the
credibility. 2.
Puzzles: The mechanic here is that you have to set up the testing chamber
in such a way as to destroy the base. You have a checklist of things to do, and
the action principally comprises walking around the base, searching for the
things you need to do and then doing them. This is fundamentally a bit tedious –
there’s no creative thinking required for any of it, and the activation sequence
involves a certain amount of pointless busywork (the doors around you lock, and
you have to reset everything before you can unlock them).
The one puzzle in the game which does involve an ingenious approach is as
follows: late in the game you need a small iron object, so you tear down a shelf
in order to get at the nails. Perfectly reasonable, and if I had been doing this
kind of puzzle all along I might very well have got it; but by this point I
didn’t have much expectation of anything beyond ‘find thing, use in the obvious
way’, and my brain had pretty much disengaged.
Finally, the narrative integration could stand to be stronger: if, for instance,
we had more about the science of the project and Williams’ interest in it, this
could have developed into an OK theme. But since we don’t even know what this
stuff is for, ‘I’ll show them all’ – and thus the main motivation of the puzzle
– is kind of disconnected. 2.
Theme: At one point it’s mentioned that it’s only a few hours until
sunrise – this is tied to a clock, but as far as I could tell there’s no
significant time limit, nor any particular reason why things have to be wrapped
up by sunrise. Present, but an insignificant detail. 2.
Technical: I did not encounter any significant bugs, and it all pretty
much works fine. 3.
Overall: 2.
Reviewed by Andrew Schultz.
This is a game about someone who has just gone on a shooting spree. They're
faced with the consequences, but there's still one more thing to do. The
question: what?
It wasn't really clear to me at first. I figured it was some sort of experiment,
but it's tough to put everything together. The main character's job is to figure
why his experiment has gone wrong, or he can't show people his breakthrough. I
confess I'm very confused why the game starts at 2 AM. It makes me wonder how
long the dead people were there for, and why you didn't do things sooner, or why
the SWAT team didn't break in sooner. This makes a bad first impression re:
realism.
My first play-through, I got locked into the Control Room with no way out. The
walkthrough has a typo--you need to go east twice at one point--but it made
sense when I looked at it. I don't think the energy rod was well-clued, but at
least you could TAKE ALL to plow through it. At that point it becomes a bit Rube
Goldberg-y for me, and I figured you have to push a bunch of buttons, but
actually getting the rod and crystal in place didn't work. Maybe this is me
rushing things. After all, I only did X LIST and not READ LIST until later.
Perhaps the hints could poke you to do that before giving the full walkthrough?
This was an awkward game to play through but my impression was that it didn't
mean to be this awkward. Perhaps another reason was that I'd played another game
this person wrote, Again and Again, and I remember a lot of similar phrases and
was trying hard to reconcile the humorous tone of that game with the far more
serious tone here. And while I hate being grammar police, the lack of commas
made me picture the dialogue flashbacks as far more flippant than they were
meant to be. I also found the player's internal tone to be a bit too smug, while
Leadlight (disclosure: the author, Wade Clarke, is a friend and I tested his
game) captured the whole just letting things out there a lot better. In this
case, it feels like an author who's disposed to humor is trying a serious tone
and just missing the mark. The solution here is to have a lot of critical
testers--oh, and don't let the killer take a victim's panties? And refer to "a
receptionist" as something more? Even the receptionist whose name you didn't
mention? I think stuff like the diamond ring you search and find on the
receptionist is potentially the right sort of creepy, and you don't want to give
too much detail--but as is, it feels disbelievable.
I think there are a few ways to go about doing this better. The introduction
could mean more. Perhaps build a stronger story with each body you examine. I'd
have liked a way to turn myself in, or at least a stern reject of why I can't
unlock the office or don't want to. And I think a lot of parsercomp games will
have neat tweaks to make them better, but this felt like it fell far short of
its emotional potential--while Sunrise upset me, it outlined some scenarios and
its flashbacks gave me something to wrestle with. This feels splashed out there,
and X-ing various people, well, they're just there, and the protagonist hates
everyone, and it feels sort of emo. I don't know--even providing the player with
hints like "How'd this experiment go" or "You're bumbling around like X did"
might hit the right tone of self-righteousness for the character.
So I think this experiment didn't work, and I'd like some way to sympathize with
anyone here beyond "the protagonist's experiment failed." Maybe his small
successes were ignored? He was teased around the office? Maybe people around the
office weren't total monsters, but something earlier affected him?
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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