Reviews by Kake

I really enjoyed this one. The hints are well-paced, the puzzles make sense, the implementation is sound, and there's lots to play around with.

The only bug I managed to find was a small one which produced a small amount of contradictory output, but it didn't spoil anything. The game did give me an unsolicited hint at one point, but that might have been because I'd just asked it for a few hints in succession, and to be honest I really did need it.

Would definitely recommend this game.

Aw, this is brilliant! Excellent attention to detail, and an awful lot of fun. It's well worth playing around and trying silly things that have no chance of advancing the game, just because the responses are so funny (e.g. try taking your pants off in company). Besides that, the implementation's solid, the puzzles make sense, Grunk and the pig both have a lot of character, and the ending is quite uplifting.

I really liked this one. The juxtaposition of the two storylines, the non-linear time progression, the use of different voices — all excellent.

The main story is a moving one; but the moment that I felt was the strongest, in the sense that it made me stop and go "oh wow, oh wow, oh wow", actually occurred in the story-within-a-story. It was a small thing, but it really got across one of the reasons why I should care deeply about the main character.

It's a game; it's a puzzle; it's a very, very good depiction of an alien universe from the perspective of one of its inhabitants.

The reference is to the sentence "The gostak distims the doshes", which is used to illustrate how syntax can convey meaning — we don't know what a gostak is, nor what distimming is, nor what doshes are, but we do know that distimming is something a gostak does to doshes, and we know that doshes can be distimmed by a gostak. As you play the game, you uncover meaning-in-this-sense, and you learn how things are related to each other; but there is no perfect one-to-one mapping of the gostak's language to English, and I have a strong feeling that the gostak's universe is very different from ours.

I "completed" the game a few days ago, but there's still a lot to discover and speculate on, so I'm still playing it.

I approached Floatpoint as a story, rather than a puzzle or a game, and it met all my expectations and more. I'm fairly sure that even if I'd been reading it as a linear, fixed narrative, I'd still have enjoyed it; but the fact that I could influence the ending (towards what I felt was the right thing to do) gave it an extra dimension.

For context, I'm a great fan of short stories, and of the kind of science fiction that focuses on how the snazzy futuristic situations affect the people who find themselves in them. Floatpoint hit all my buttons. I just wish my memory was less vivid, so I could play it again sooner and try for a different goal!

(I should also note that in contrast to Valzi's review as of 27 October 2007, I didn't encounter any bugs.)