Ratings and Reviews by iaraya

The first thing that caught my eye about this one is, it's an actual minesweeper game. In HTML. On the AO3 fanfiction archive. I've experimented with AO3's limited HTML/CSS support, to help writer friends do things like linked footnotes and mimicking Twitter threads, but I never knew this level of interaction was possible. I've been looking through the code and it's super impressive.

On the game itself, this is an affecting and bittersweet story that links into the mechanics of minesweeper surprisingly well. It's set in the universe of The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, but you do not need familiarity with either the books or the recent TV series to understand the game. It would be useful to know that SecUnits are androids rented as security personnel; they are slaves, their actions controlled by a governor module that inflicts pain if they disobey orders or violate policy. You do need to know how to play minesweeper.

In-universe the minesweeper board is a research survey site, that two SecUnits are combing through to map out locations of deadly beetles (the mines) and hopefully avoid being killed themselves. The story is told through communications between the SecUnits, the AI HubSystem, and the research team, which is slowly revealed as you play. It's an evocative glimpse into the SecUnits' constrained lives: the careful, defiant ways they sneak through jokes and pseudo-swearing without triggering punishment for unprofessionalism, the jokes they make despite punishment. It's increasingly and infuruatingly clear that the research team views them as disposable tools; the whole reason the SecUnits are risking their lives scanning for danger at close range is because the supervisor considered that cheaper than authorising high quality satellite scans.

It makes for the most immersive game of minesweeper I've ever played. Each move is a lot more emotionally tense, when a mistake means the death of people who just sent each other funny gifs and complained about their client's incompetence, who will not even be mourned. I made moves only when I was sure; guessing at beetle/bomb locations even with UNDO turned on felt almost like treating the SecUnits as as callously as the survey supervisor does, placing information over their lives.

The player's progress triggers the communications but do not affect them (unless you uncover beetles and die), until the very end, at the most heartbreaking moment in the game. (major spoilers below)

(Spoiler - click to show)If you play minesweeper mostly in the intended way, you come to the last two squares where there isn't enough information to definitively tell where the beetle is. For the first time in the game you have to guess, with 50/50 chance at the SecUnits being eaten by carnivorous beetles. The supervisor does not authorise better scans, or allow just cordoning off both squares as unsafe. They expect the SecUnits to go in and risk death to get as much data as possible, which of course they do. It's what they're designed for. The player makes the guess, the SecUnits survive, or not, based on that choice.

A murder mystery with a rather unique premise and mechanics: a lord of fairyland was killed, a bunch of nobles are claiming credit, and it’s up to you to poke holes in their confessions to find the real killer. But it takes a while, about an hour, before you actually get to the scene of the crime. I thought that was an odd choice, to advertise a murder mystery but put so much stuff before it. Some of the obstacles turned out to be rather fitting, like how the protagonist is in a wheelchair and struggles to get up the palace stairs, or helping the 'underfoot' spirits in their efforts to get accommodations. But other parts, like the word searches, felt unnecessary. In my opinion, the game could do more to sprinkle in news about the murder at the start, and better signpost that getting into the palace is the goal.

I enjoyed how the protagonist is in a wheelchair and this actually has an impact on the game mechanics. You can’t get up stairs, open a heavy door, or navigate the narrow stalls of the goblin market, and have to use spells to find workarounds. And the paperwork! Navigating the complex bureaucracy and filling out convoluted forms was the aspect of gameplay I found the most interesting.

The mystery itself was fun to solve. For the most part it was easy to tell that a suspect was innocent, either because they had no incentive to kill or from slip-ups they made in their statement. The real challenge is in finding concrete evidence that they couldn't have done the crime in the way they described. All of these puzzles had clever solutions, some involving submitting more complicated forms.

It did get tedious when I was pretty sure I knew who the killer was, curiosity satisfied, but couldn't prove it. This was especially the case when I died, without the chance to undo, and realised I'd have to redo all the convoluted form-filling (I suppose this is also true to life). I did like that the killer was (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)the one person who didn’t immediately try to benefit from the death, and who killed the lord out of frustration at his assholery instead of for political gain. Proving she was the killer and helping her become Queen felt good.

I went into this game intrigued by the blurb’s statement that several totally different playthroughs are all possible, and the game definitely lived up to that premise!

It truly feels open-ended. It takes place at a festival and captures that atmosphere, at any given moment there are so many different people to talk to and things happening in different places. You will always miss things. The protagonist Irene can choose to pursue her own goal of getting a permit to wear trousers in the forest (which I did eventually manage), or go off and investigate the many mysterious happenings: the invisible crying man and the poet, the strange Burber, a political conspiracy, all of which intersect in various ways. It can be confusing in the beginning since you don't have context for the things and people you, but over time one can follow each thread and begin figure out how it's all connected.

After completing seven or eight playthroughs over a week, I think I have a good idea of what’s going on? But there are still many things that I have not seen. I think that is longer than most players, but I kept having new ideas for things I wanted to see and try, each playthrough answering some questions and bringing up new ones. I wrote up my notes on the story and timeline of events on the forum here (spoilers galore).

The UI is great. The background changes, and the text is at a very readable size and leading. The updating reminders of current objectives are very useful, as are the prompts to auto-navigate to quest locations, which cuts down on constantly opening the map or missing things from poor navigation. Some of the images look out of place and a bit amateurish, however, as there isn’t a consistent style among the different graphics. But that is a small quibble.

I think the storyline I’m most intrigued by is (Spoiler - click to show)the aunt, currently pretending to be a Burber. She knows so much seemingly about the political assassination plot against her brother and is fighting with one of the conspirators — what is she trying to accomplish here? And her illness, brought on by dreams that come true, surely connects to the crying man come alive from the poem, but how? Gloria, too; the game starts with a warning about her and I still have no idea what her deal is.

I will definitely come back to this at some points, try to find out more about my unanswed questions