Reviews by Tabitha

This is a tight, focused game set in the trenches during a war—the first game with that setting I’ve encountered! I will confess that I tend to dislike war fiction (war is horrible; I don’t need stories to remind me), but this piece isn’t actually focused on the horrors; rather, it uses that backdrop to create some neat little puzzles and a compelling reason to solve them.

It’s hard to establish a crisis mood in a parser game, and in this one, while ambient messages every few turns mention the explosions ringing out overhead, their repetitiveness and lack of impact on the gameplay made them fade into the background quickly. But the descriptions of the immediate setting really captured the place, with succinct and evocative images such as:

An unknown liquid has turned the bottom dirt to muck, requiring a haphazard layer of pallets to provide flooring.

>x pallets
The pallets have half-sunk into the mystery muck at the bottom of the trench. It would take heavy pry bars to move them.

These kinds of details really made it feel like this game could be set nowhere else, and while it feels weird to say I enjoyed inhabiting this space, I did like experiencing this unusual IF setting.

I said above the game is tight; I didn’t count the number of rooms, but it was quite low (five or six?), with typically one significant object to find and collect in each. Because the possibility space was so small, some of the time I felt like I was stumbling upon the puzzle solutions ((Spoiler - click to show)“I need to extend the reach of this wire—I guess the tripod must be for that since it’s the only item I have left?”) rather than actually figuring them out. On the other hand, I also turned to the hints twice (for (Spoiler - click to show)tuning the radio and for looking at the back of the code page); having them built-in and context-dependent was much appreciated! And on the third hand, (Spoiler - click to show)making the series of radio calls required to secure my escape was very satisfying.

In all, it’s a well made little game that’s much better than it had to be given its origin as a programming exercise to learn TADS. In my own learning-Inform game, I just made a simulation of a few streets in my neighborhood. This is much more imaginative and fun to play!