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My Mind's Mishmash Reviews
Author: Robert Street
Date: 2007
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviwed by MathBrush
ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular
parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.
The
concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game
after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to
Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.
The video game is
about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies
most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.
I enjoyed the
opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.
Reviewed by Jimmy Maher
This game takes place in an online multi-player VR game
of the (I assume) near future. Within this VR takes place quite an intricate
story, involving five preternaturally gifted teenagers who have been conscripted
due to their native psychic abilities to fight an Alien
Menace. Think Endor's Game happening within a smaller and more tightly scripted
World of Warcraft, in ten or twenty years time. Now, you are yourself a teenager
in the real world with the rather annoying handle of Surviveor (don't ask), who
is a player within this game. Initially you are playing the role of one of the
five chosen teenagers, but soon other events -- or, more specifically, the
nefarious actions of your arch-enemy Memoryblam -- leave you running about the
simulation as a sort of ghost. You must find your way through five "episodes" of
the game by locating an exit node in each that will allow access to the next
level. And of course you must fend off the harrasments of Memoryblam, and
eventually defeat him before making your final escape. Got all that? If not,
don't worry about it. Suffice to say that if you fail, all will be lost. Or at
least your homework will when your computer crashes.
In spite of having short tolerance for snotty teenage gamers, I have to
recognize that it's a clever and intricate scenario, well thought through for
the most part. There are problems here, though, that make it impossible for me
to love or even like it too much.
First of all, it's written with ADRIFT, and the usual parser problems with that
system crop up right from the first scene, in which you are fighting, still "in
character" as this point, inside a sort of robotic combat suit. (Shades of
Starship Troopers. Mr. Street has certainly covered all of the classic science
fiction bases with this one.) This suit is equipped with a suitably cool variety
of weaponry. It's not much fun to play with, however, when stuff like this
starts happening: shoot traitor with psychic disruptor You activate the machine
guns, aiming them towards the traitor's suit. You scatter your fire to try to
catch the quickly dodging suit. Some bullets hit the mark, but the armour is too
strong. You eventually stop to conserve bullets and consider your next tactic.
In case you were wondering: yes, the psychic disruptor and the machine guns are
two completely different weapons. This sort of parser fun continues throughout
the game, leaving you with that constant uncomfortable feeling of wondering
whether you are truly on the wrong track or the game just doesn't understand
what you are trying to do because you haven't hit on the One True Word
Combination. Some very tricky puzzles, and ADRIFT's unfortunate tendency to lie
to you about what it can really understand by giving innocuous responses to
things that should result in "I don't understand you" error messages, really
excacberate the problem.
But this game has problems that go beyond ADRIFT. While the intricacy of the
world it constructs is admirable, there are a few puzzles I found dodgy and
underclued, bordering on unfair if not completely crossing the line. That's a
shame, as there are plenty of others that are genuinely engaging and fun to
solve. Another big problem is the writing. It's clear and grammatical and all
that, but it reads like an adventure game filtered through the sensibility of
Rain Man. Everything is described well enough, but it's just so dry that it
quickly becomes a chore to get through this quite lengthy game. If the author
can't get any more excited than this about his own game, why should I?
The logic of your ability to interact with the gameworld also seems to break
down in a few places, unless I am misunderstanding something. You wear something
called a ghost cap throughout most of the game, which makes you invisible to
computer-controlled inhabitants of the world but also prevents you from directly
interacting with your physical surroundings. Many of the puzzles thus involve
taking off the ghost cap at just the right moment to accomplish what you need to
while not being spotted and killed. For the most part, this works well enough,
but in some places later in the game you can do some decidedly active things
while wearing the cap. This leads to an even further level of confusion, as you
are never quite sure what you really can and cannot do while wearing the cap.
Score: 5 out of 10.
Reviewed by
Sam Kabo
Ashwell
Title Suggests: Random scenes with little relevance to each other bolted
together to produce a comp-size entry.
So, I'm a sixteen-year-old psychic controlling a giant robot. This is a) not my
genre, and b) something difficult to make work in IF. It's no easy task to make
a battle scene exciting and dangerous-feeling in an IF format, and this roundly
fails.
Then it turns out that I'm someone playing a game about being a sixteen-year-old
psychic controlling a giant robot, and now I have to sneak around the
virtual-reality gameworld in order to escape from griefers. I am seized with
ennui. I quit, telling myself I'll come back later if I'm possessed by an
uncharacteristic attack of fairness. Right now I'm thinking that a 4 would be
generous.
Rating: 3
Reviewed by J. D. Clemens
Needs synonyms for "rip node". Liked the opening, puzzles. Understand just enough to make progress. really liked the mine door puzzle. Great puzzles. enjoyed the symmetry between interaction with memoryblam and game story. Thought it a bit heavy-handed when he said so, though. Some of the default messages seem inappropriate after the game knows I'm there ("don't want to leave anything that may reveal your presence"). Some of the timing a bit too forced (things happen exactly when needed). Not quite done at 2 hours, so scoring before finishing. I really liked the story structure, sort of seeing things from behind the scenes, or from a new perspective. One of my favourites.
Reviewed by Andreas Davour
You're in some kind of futuristic setting and
everything is written as if you already know everything, which you as the player
don't. When it actually say "having seen this before you ..." I feel the author
don't help me get into the setting and being locked in a room with no
obvious exits I quit. This game gets a 2.
Reviewed by Jason Dyer
First I give a general review, then after some spoiler
space I go into specifics about a puzzle in Episode 3.
The valley has been turned into a war zone. There are cold suits everywhere
attacking each other. The People’s Shareholdings had aimed to take this mine
complex, using the majority of its troops in a surprise attack. However, it had
not managed to break through quickly enough. The troops elsewhere for the United
Institutions are converging on the area, leaving the suits of the People’s
Shareholdings trapped between two forces. The battle is quickly becoming very
ugly.
I like how the structural trick affects gameplay: the character is travelling
the parts of a story he’s already gone through, so he knows automatically what
places and objects are important enough to bother with. (It’s similar to A
Matter of Importance, which sorts objects based on the main character’s
intuition, and Ferrous Ring, which sorts “good” and “bad” by survival sense.)
The structure also leads to a strange disjoint in seriousness of plot: the
virtual world characters are fighting for their lives, while the main character
is fighting for his homework (which wasn’t backed up so will be erased if he
dies). It’s both poignant and irritating, partly because even the serious
characters aren’t drawn that thoroughly. I’ll still give it points for
originality, and it left me thinking after I finished the game.
The puzzle implementation is fuzzy around the edges. I say puzzle
implementation, and not puzzles: in concept there are some quite ingenious ones
(the ghost cap is brilliant), but in implementation they’re marred by missing
verbs, incomplete descriptions, and misleading messages. For example…
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
(puzzle for episode 3 spoiled down below!)
S
P
A
C
E
…in episode 3 next to the mine cart you have to get inside the cybersuit to move
a piece of a broken barrier into a cart, after which sending the cart along its
track will cause it to fall into a crack and form a makeshift bridge. However:
Trying to enter the cart gives the response: “You want to test how the cart
moves before riding in it.” This implies the solution involves riding through
somehow. However, as far as I can tell it is impossible to ride the cart, even
though the message hints there is a way. (More helpful would be something about
how a trip in the cart would send you flying down the crack.)
You can only refer to the barrier as a “barrier”, and not as “parts” or
“wreckage” (the latter word being used in the room description while in the
suit, and not “barrier”, so it’s nonobvious the barrier is even accessible from
the suit).
Trying to “pull lever” in the suit gives the message “You do not want to use the
controls unnecessarily and attract attention.” This misleadingly implies you
don’t want to touch the controls at all. Giving a message explaining how to
direct the controls specifically would have helped; I had to consult the
walkthrough.
After solving the puzzle, going back to “examine crack” or “examine rail” gives
no change in description, and the only way to tell what happened is to >LOOK and
check the room description (which is itself one long word-jammed paragraph).
Other puzzles have similar issues. Nothing here is fatal, but the accumulation
of difficulties make the puzzles much harder to solve than they ought to be.
Reviewed by Jacqueline A. Lott
Yep. Horrifying.
But first impressions aren't everything, so let's play this one a bit. We're a
sixteen year old named Marcus. We're psychic, and we are in command of a
futuristic army fighting the Buggers aliens. Except the aliens are better at
everything and the only (not sufficient) edge that we have is that we can
communicate with our troops psychically, and we have an allegedly-spiffy
modified cold suit which we can also control psychically.
Hooray for being psychic!
But, see, the thing is, I'm not actually psychic in real life, nor are there
special commands for controlling the suit (at least none that are indicated when
I type >COMMANDS). This led to a really frustrating exchange with the parser:
A modified cold suit belonging to the enemy is also on the display, which must
be the traitor's suit. All the old weapons such as the shoulder mounted machine
guns, electrifying grappling hooks and the diamond edged pickaxe are in both of
your suits. However, your suit boasts a new weapon, with a psychic disruptor.
You can activate any of these weapons with just a thought.
>think
I don't understand what you mean!
>disrupt
I don't understand what you mean!
>activate
I don't understand what you mean!
>disrupt traitor
I don't understand what you want me to do with the traitor.
>kill traitor
Now that isn't very nice.
That's when I quit. I was too frustrated to care that I wasn't very far into the
game. Knowing that my husband had somehow gotten past this awkwardness didn't
help matters - especially since he can no longer remember how he did it and was
consequently unable to help me.
Wait! I had a second thought, and restarted the game. Going to the hints, it
turns out the verb I'm looking for is >use disruptor. Bah.
So I played a little bit more, and got a little bit more of a sense that this is
sort of very Enderesque, but not nearly so good as Orson Scott Card. Who knows?
Maybe this was Robert Street's original idea (Ender wasn't psychic, after all),
and so if this was an original idea, my apologies... it's just that someone else
did it before you and did it a whole lot better.
Man, I feel rather guilty writing such a harsh review. Sorry about that.
Rating: 4
Reviewed by
Michael Martin
This one didn't work as well as I'd hoped. It also has a heavy meta element --
the entire game takes place in an extremely hostile cyberspace that's simulating
an adventure game -- but that's less of an issue than one would expect.
I'm not sure what disengaged me. The managing of the ghost caps bothered me,
though I greatly appreciated the command macros and it was really core to the
setting. The basic conflict didn't convince me at all, though. The character of
memoryblam and your casually lethal conflict with him had a life-is-cheap
attitude that really didn't seem to fit in with the schoolkids-having-fun-and-scoring-points-off-each-other
vibe that most of the rest of the game had. The map also felt sprawling and
diffuse, though patrol puzzles do tend to require that kind of thing.
So yeah, I don't know. It's not bad, and I never caught it horribly failing, but
I never really felt like it grabbed me.
Score: 5
Reviewed by Dan Shiovitz
I feel like I should have understood My Mind's Mishmash
better than I did after playing through it all. Like, I think the deal is it's a
VR game you're playing, but is it supposed to be based on actual historical
events? Are you one of the characters depicted in the game? If so, isn't it kind
of weird to do a VR game of a horrific massacre only a short time after the
massacre? (Though I guess the 9/11 movies only took five years to show up.) But
if it's not a real thing and you're not an involved character, why do you care?
Is it basically just a competitive IF game?
Confusion over the storyline aside, this was pretty fun. The primary shtick is
being able to switch between being immaterial and being material, and this turns
out to be fun in a sneak-around kinda way. It also has a cute device of separate
episodes that you jump between, although I wish more had been done with
switching back and forth. The feud with the other guy provides a nice
larger-scale plot and a good balance with the smaller-scale puzzles. The puzzles
were overall fairly straightforward, nothing too exciting but usually not too
obscure either. The setting felt kind of recycled and not entirely coherent —
blah blah robots blah blah psychic powers — but this turned out not to matter so
much, because sneaking around immaterially puts a new spin on everything anyway.
So overall, pretty decent.
Reviewed by Benjamin Sokal
The premise is that you're stuck in a simulated game
world and you've got to reach the end of the game to get out. Interestingly
enough, this game world seems itself to be part of a network on which you have
an avatar. Apparently in this world, people spend much or most of their time
online (like the real world, I suppose). Your problem is that you haven't backed
up all the work you've done the past few days and will lose your homework if you
die in the game. The fellow who chased you into the game and forced you to shut
the entry node, memoryblam, is after you - but traveling backwards from the end
of the game (level 5, late in the war) to the beginning (level 1). You'll have
to deal with him when you two cross paths.
The game itself is a simulation of the entire war between humans and aliens,
where only one side can survive. Is this a reflection of your reality or just a
game? I'm not sure. Although I tend to think it isn't your reality, I could be
wrong.
So far, so good. The concept is very cool. How does the game play? Many of the
puzzles involve dodging people in the game world with the help of a cap that
makes you invisible but unable to interact with objects. You move around from
room to room (and occasionally level to level) of quite a large map, stealing
keycards, manipulating equipment, and otherwise being clever & stealthy. The
action intensifies as the levels increase, and you'll have to deal with robots
that the game has generated to root you out. The game is long, very long, with
some really tricky but logical puzzles. It's definitely not beatable in 2 hours
without a walkthrough. However I can see the appeal of a game like this if
you're willing to invest enough energy into it.
Problems? Not too many to speak of. I think the descriptions could be worded
clearer. A few times some vital information was hidden in the middle of a
paragraph and I missed it. I had lots of trouble with the very beginning of the
game because I didn't really understand what the cold suits were. I figured I
was in one, but was confused by some descriptions of items in the cold suits and
some cold suits behind me. Was I supposed to manipulate the other suits? Was I
supposed to order the people in the other suits around? Was I supposed to get
some items from the other suits? In the end the solution was logical and simple,
but it could have been worded better.
Enough complaining. This is a good game.
Ben's rating: 3
Reviewed by Jake
Wildstrom
Ah, ADRIFT. Wonky enough to throw me, and occasionally doing things which I find
deeply offensive, such as:
> HIT PANEL WITH AXE
You hit, but nothing happens.
Looks like an effective response, but...
> HIT EFIPGEDRJOPER WITH AXE
You hit, but nothing happens.
Grr, thanks for nothing. Anyways, getting into the game proper I'm dropped into
the deep end. My character is presumably motivated and knows what's going on,
but I'm not and don't really care. Give me a reason to be invested in the story.
What are nodes? Why do I want to rip them? Why am I hiding anyways? These aren't
deep mysteries to the PC, and they shouldn't be to me either. I guess this wants
to be Ender's Game meets Lawnmower Man or something, but it's going to have to
clue me in a lot more to the worldmodel for that to work.
The narrative style is weird. Stilted, trying a bit too hard with descriptions
and trying for a level of formality which is neither matched by the game's tone
nor by the writer's prose skills. It's uncomfortable.
Anyways, I'm feeling curmudgeonly, so I'm calling this one a day because it is
simply failing to draw me in, and ADRIFT keeps making my life miserable. (Oh,
and, for the record, "COMBINE" isn't on the verb-list.)
Rating: 5
Reviewed by
Mike Snyder
Merk’s Score: 8+
Game’s Blurb:
A mishmash of robots, psychic powers and "ghosts" in a game of action and
survival.
Robert Street burst onto the IF scene in 2004 (as “Rafgon”) with a short Zcode
game for Dave Bernazzani’s C32 Competition -- a game called Turning Point, which
I had the pleasure of beta testing. Since then, Robert has switched to Adrift
(his The Potter and the Mould took second place in the 2006 Spring Thing
competition), except for one excellent Zcode game (The Colour Pink), which
placed highly in the 2005 IFComp.
I’ve come to expect good things from Robert, and on most levels, My Mind’s
Mishmash doesn’t disappoint. It begins in the last episode of a five-part
story-within-a-story, before jumping back to the start after the episode
concludes. This opener, however, is confusing and somewhat difficult to
visualize. This might be intentional, and it’s at least solvable without a great
understanding of what’s going on.
The story centers on “surviveor” (short for “survive or die”), whom the game
describes as “a precocious schoolkid who plans to survive again today.” The PC’s
story is layered over the larger backdrop of a corporate-run world, in which the
workers of a mining operation find themselves in conflict with another global
organization. As interlopers, “surviveor” and his nemesis “memoryblam”
(lowercase on purpose) become mixed up in the conflict (and in a coming war
against aliens invaders). With a ghost-like ability to become invisible (a
clever construction of the world they inhabit), the two kids move about largely
undetected.
This “ghost cap” plays a part in several of the game’s puzzles. When invisible,
“surviveor” can’t interact with much of anything. When visible, however, he’s
quickly caught (if anybody is nearby to notice). As he searches for an exit from
the complex (hoping to avoid his arch enemy in the process), the backdrop story
moves forward or backwards by way of a “node ripper” device. It’s a bit like
time travel, but to say more would be to say too much.
The game’s puzzles fit well with the story. Most are logical, although I
struggled with a few of them. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the
explosives (I needed a hint), but it made perfect sense after I saw the answer.
In another spot (while suspended on a grating above an invisible “memoryblam”
and an alien), I had the right idea but just didn’t perform the proper action.
Another spot, involving the use of a “cold suit,” was made difficult because I
attempted to control the thing with buttons and levers instead of a more direct
imperative (I suspect better cluing might have been the key there). Most notably
(and disappointingly), the endgame requires visualizing the area on top of a
hill in order to take an unclued and unprompted action. My mental image was
evidently off, because I needed another of the built-in hints here as well.
The game has many puzzles, though, and most work pretty well. Even though the
hints helped in those few instances, I never felt a reliance on them. Even after
asking for help, I was able to progress quite a ways on my own until the next
too-tough spot. What hurt most was just my inability to visualize several areas
of the game. I don’t know if this was the writer’s fault or my own, but I
haven’t had such difficulties in most of the other games this year.
Something about Robert’s writing has always struck me as a little off, but I
never can pinpoint exactly what it is. In prior games, it seemed to be long or
confusing sentences, or maybe problems with punctuation. In My Mind’s Mishmash,
nothing stands out as wrong per se. It’s just... lacking in color? Dry?
Matter-of-fact without any warmth or excitement? His stories aren’t dull. His
games are fun. He has a way with world-building and puzzles. But... something
about the writing just makes it all less effective than it should be. I never
noticed much technically wrong with this one -- just a few minor mistakes here
and there -- but something about it keeps it from evoking the intended
excitement of thrilling chases, epic battles, and awe-inspiring scenery.
Although the game is well constructed in general (with a few bugs -- I’ll talk
briefly about those coming up), two particular non-standard design decisions
struck me as odd. First, rooms (or locations) aren’t given titles. Initially,
this made map-keeping a little more difficult, but since room titles do appear
on Adrift’s built-in auto-map, this might only be a problem for players with a
non-standard Adrift runner. Also, the game never enters an “ending” state. This
one could have something to do with the premise itself, but if so, I wasn’t
quite convinced (and it seems to me that it would work just as well with a
traditional ending routine). In essence, even when the game ends (or reaches an
earlier losing ending), Adrift is still taking commands as if nothing happened.
Granted, you can’t do much of anything (you’re given suggestions to reload,
restart, or undo), but the traditional “game over” condition is oddly absent.
It certainly feels polished in most areas, but a few bugs (or areas for
improvement) are present in the competition version. Disambiguation difficulties
prevent referencing a “node” when carrying the node ripper. The two sections of
the complex are termed “northwest” and “southeast” at one point, even though on
the map they appear to be “northeast” and “southwest.” I’m told to test out a
mine cart even after I already have. The laptop can’t be called “computer.” The
ghost cap prevents me from talking to “memoryblam,” even though he can talk to
me. A few other small quirks are noted in my transcripts, but this one stands
out as a disappointing bit of irony:
memoryblam is blocking the northern exit and he raises his gun in your
direction. Running away might be a good option now.
>run away
Why would you want to run?
memoryblam shoots you before you can do anything else. You have not survived...
None of these issues keep the game from being enjoyable and recommendable,
although a post-competition update would be ideal.
By the end, most of the two blended stories make sense. There is, however, a bit
of a mystery shrouding “surviveor’s” world. The answers may lie in subtle clues
encountered along the way -- a bit about homework, a bit about the scarcity of
books, a bit about privacy, and the nature of My Mind’s Mishmash in general --
but I never quite worked it all out. I get the gist of it, and the game makes it
clear what’s going on. That’s enough to enjoy the story, but I still wondered a
little about the world not seen.
I voted it a “9” at two hours, but a few more difficulties later in the game
bring the “review” score down one point. A “plus” for some cool in-game gadgets,
fun puzzles, and a really intriguing sci-fi premise make it an “8+” on my
judging scale.
Reviewed by Emily Short
“My Mind’s Mishmash” has a truly unfortunate blurb on
the competition website:
A mishmash of robots, psychic powers and “ghosts” in a game of action and
survival.
This jacket-blurb suggests to me that the author has written some confused
cliché-ridden pap, that he realizes this, and that he has nonetheless submitted
it to the competition. He would not be the first to do so, either. Since this is
not the case — “My Mind’s Mishmash” is not incoherent junk — I’m not sure why
the author didn’t give it a better advertisement. I guess sometimes deliberately
lowering the player’s expectations pays off, but it’s risky to make the game
sound actively un-fun.
As it happens, the world-building is considerably more cohesive than this
write-up suggests: there are some cliché ideas, but this is not an entirely
generic world, and the various elements work together sensibly. I very much
enjoyed the opening segment, which led off with a contained, accessible puzzle
and seemed to be setting me up for a kind of Ender’s Game scenario.
For all that, “My Mind’s Mishmash” has a number of drawbacks, especially as a
competition game. The one that I can mention without spoiling anything: it’s
much too long, and the puzzles too hard. I’m not sure how anyone would get all
the puzzles and get through in anything like two hours. I spent quite some time
wandering around near the very beginning of the game, making almost no progress
at all, then broke down and went to the walkthrough; and even with the
walkthrough in hand, typing pretty much exactly those commands and doing little
other exploring, I found that it took me another hour and some minutes to see
the rest of the game.
More specific commentary on the game’s weaknesses and strengths after the
spoiler cut.
This is a game most likely to be enjoyed over considerably more than two hours.
Drawing a map is a good idea. Save: it is possible to be killed somewhat
unexpectedly. (I did this the first time I was typing through the walkthrough,
and had not saved, so had to type in almost the entire thing again.)
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
So, drawbacks first.
First, I have a hard time being persuaded by the central premise that there is
no way for the player to save his avatar’s information and leave the game
without going back through the entire thing. Presumably he’s been saving
periodically while playing anyway, right? Why wouldn’t there be some mechanism
to save and leave from one of the earlier episodes?
Second, I have the sense that the revelation about memoryblam’s real-life
identity is supposed to be a dramatic twist, but I was unmoved. Perhaps the
betrayal of a real-life ally (your brother) is meant to parallel Lauren’s
betrayal (in the game), but neither of these relationships was explored fully
enough by the game for me to have strong feelings about them.
Third, why does the ghost cap prevent us opening doors but not allow us to walk
through them? It seems like we should either be able to touch the doors or not,
but the ghost cap seems to create a strange intermediate state of being where we
interact physically with doors only if trying to pass through them. This is
highly convenient to the game design, I grant, but I wondered throughout why it
should be so.
Fourth, I found the text, qua text, hard to read. This may seem like a trivial
complaint, but the fact that room descriptions and event descriptions were
typically blocked into single monolithic paragraphs impeded my reading speed.
The paragraphing also made it harder to pick out, visually, the distinguishing
features of a room. And since many of the rooms had similar names and were
generally alike (the hallway segments, especially), I found I had a
harder-than-usual time telling places apart and remembering the layout of the
base overall.
This all feels a bit lame to complain about, like saying that I’m too lazy to
read what’s in front of me unless the author breaks it up into tiny bites. But
there was no real aesthetic value to having the text arranged this way, and I
was already finding the game a bit of a challenge to follow: there was lots of
exposition to take in, some quite difficult puzzles to resolve, and much more
content than I was likely to get through in two hours. So having another aspect
of the game that slowed me down and confused me was not good.
Now, after all that griping, I should say that I thought this structure was a
novel and interesting way of conveying a story. The player wanders through the
setting, knowing both what has happened and what is going to happen there;
various areas take on added significance because of the foreshadowing of things
to come. This still lacks the immediacy of being allowed to participate in all
the action yourself, but I found it fairly entertaining and effective; the story
has a directness that you can’t get from the standard
find-diary-entries-and-view-recordings adventure game exposition.
I would have liked it if the game-play had focused more on revelations about
plot and character, rather than on multiple puzzles to do with stealing
passcards — but even so, I thought the method was neat.
Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt
A work by veteran author Robert Street. Spoilers follow
the break.
This one starts with the intriguing chapter heading “EPISODE 5: The Final
Battle”. You’re playing the role of a teenage psychic mecha pilot fighting
aliens, but it turns out that the “you” who’s playing that role is the player
character, not the player. It’s a two-layered narrative: the story of the war is
told within the story of playing it as a VR simulation. That’s pretty cool.
Episode 5 really is the end of the inner story, but circumstances immediately
force the PC back into the beginning of Episode 1, this time without a role to
play. Your goal is to get back out the exit in Episode 5 without losing your
avatar, but the nodes connecting episodes go both ways, so there’s effectively a
time travel element. You have an item, a “ghost cap”, that renders you invisible
and intangible when worn (but not capable of walking through walls). Without it,
any NPC who sees you will have you arrested as an intruder, but with it, you
can’t pick up or manipulate items. Since the player needs to toggle the cap
frequently, it’s given a couple of custom verbs (”wc” and “rc”, for “wear cap”
and “remove cap”). These are all really good ideas!
So let me describe now my experience of the game. I played through the prologue
described above, then had some difficulty figuring out how to get on a conveyor
belt — I never did figure out the correct phrasing, but discovered a bug that
let me get past anyway1 — then explored a ring of rooms, figured out more or
less what I had to do in what sequence, but was missing one crucial item,
something to provide “computing power” for a prototype psychic listening device
I had picked up. I was stuck for a full hour, and the built-in hints didn’t
provide enough information to help me. I eventually consulted the walkthrough
and found that I had missed a door. There are a bunch of doors scattered around;
some of them can be opened, some cannot. I honestly thought I had tried them
all, but apparently I had tried all but one. I can’t fully blame the game for
this one.
So, at this point I was about an hour and twenty minutes into the judging period
and hadn’t gotten out of Episode 1. The next bit was something that I was pretty
sure I had to do, but didn’t know what the effect would be: listening in on
those psychic teenagers, who were all in one room playing videogames and
presumably chatting telepathically. I knew I had to get them out of the room
they were in somehow, and hoped that their thoughts would give me a clue. In
fact, they just spontaneously leave the room right after you listen in on them,
a bit of Sierraesque nonsense causality. I quickly made it to Episode 2 and
immediately got stuck again. I managed to pick up some more equipment by going
back to Episode 1, but didn’t figure out how to usefully apply it.
So, all in all, even though I like a lot of the ideas here, I can’t really say I
really enjoyed the experience all that much. There really seemed to be a
substantial story going on, but I only got the barest glipmse of it. Maybe my
experience here is atypical, but then, that’s the point of having the comp
judged by popular vote.
Rating: 5
Reviewed by
Marnie Parker
And, boy, is it! This game irked me, though I didn’t take a strong dislike to it
like I did to one other. I was more disappointed than disgusted.
The writing wasn’t bad, the plot seemed promising with intriguing ideas, I like
science-fiction, I can even stand all the reruns of “Starship Troopers” on TBS,
and I like virtual reality science-fiction. But, uh, after more than a couple of
turns I wasn’t sure what this was. Or wasn’t. I suspect thought went into this,
but be warned, when it comes to science-fiction, vagueness is no substitute for
clear, good writing.
What is a cold suit? What is a node? Was I trooping? Was I virtual realitying?
Was I the ghost in the machine? A computer bug?I don’t know. I had to use the
walkthru for everything and after about 15-20 turns I gave up. I like to play,
not watch (having to use a walkthru is watching). Also, not only was the
surrounding reality, or lack of it, unclear, so was the goal. How the author
expected me to deduce what to do is beyond me. SPOILER ON. How was I supposed to
know getting into the crate was a good idea? Because how did I know that
penetrating the factory further was what I wanted? SPOILER OFF.
In sci-fi one does not have to explain HOW some technology (unfamiliar to the
reader/player) works, but, at the least, they do have to explain what it IS.
There may be a good game here somewhere, but I didn’t find it.
P.S. Note that this is another game where more beta testing would have helped
the author clarify the plot — another game that would have been greatly improved
by it. See Ferrous Ring review.
IF Authors get a big break in the comp, because many judges are committed to
finishing games regardless. Or finishing the games they started. Or finishing
some games. But when a game is released outside the comp there is another
standard, a more “real life” standard. When player confusion outweighs player
motivation and/or enjoyment – the player simply stops playing.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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