Ratings and Reviews by Spike

I.A.G. Alpha was my favorite game from IFComp 2018, and I played all of them. An English translation of a work originally written in Russian, I.A.G. Alpha appears to be an unfinished game about a guy working at a post-Soviet research institute. Its opening text consists of a note from the author explaining that he never finished writing the game but decided to release what he had written anyway. On the second screen there are comments like "TODO: finish the scene on the roof" and "TODO: comment out the debugger." And, sure enough, there's a DEBUGGER command in the upper right corner that lets you peek into parts of the game's source code. After a few scenes the author stops the action once again, this time to say that he thinks the introductory text is too long, to detail what his original plan for the game was, and then to explain more about why he never finished it.

You play a little further, and you eventually come to realize that the "unfinished" aspect of the game you are purportedly playing is entirely intentional - in fact, it's a setup for the real game to pull what I think is the most genius meta move I've ever seen. I really don't want to spoil it by giving it away, but it's so simple and yet so fundamental. And that's what makes it work so well.

An absolutely brilliant game.

In Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 you control a robot with one of your employees, Lemmy, inside. An explosion has occurred elsewhere in the facility, and Lemmy wants you to use the robot to destroy some incriminating evidence before the police show up.

This is just a bare outline of the plot. I don't want to say much else on the story other than there's more to this game than appears at first - which shouldn't surprise anyone who has played other games by Victor Gijsbers. (Check out some of his other titles to get a sense of what I mean.) Also, discovering what that more is led to one of the strongest emotional reactions I had to any game in IFComp 2018.

The writing is quite good. Lemmy's character comes out clearly from his patter. If I were more familiar with the UK's regional dialects I would probably be able to place Lemmy, but this American's ears couldn't do any better than "working-class" and "British."

Implementation is also strong. For example, to nail down the effect of controlling a robot remotely Victor had to replace many of Inform 7's standard error messages. It must have been a lot of work.

(Fun fact: This game is one of three in IFComp 2018 to feature a character who drives a Ford Fiesta.)

Overall, Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 is a strong, well-written, and well-implemented game that... packs a punch.