Ratings and Reviews by chairbender
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Interesting and short, but kinda boring, November 29, 2015I didn't feel very invested in the characters. The behavior and insanity of the protagonist doesn't help with this. I don't feel like I can really figure anything out because the narrator is unreliable, and I don't really feel like the personal experience of the narrator has any relevance to me because I'm not insane. But, most of all, I found the absence of challenges to be the biggest reason for not enjoying this very much.
I play games to have fun, and one of the biggest sources of fun for me is being engaged in solving problems and overcoming challenges. When you take that away from a game, you'd better have a really darn good case for me to want to play this game as opposed to the many, many other games out there that DO have that engagement. This game doesn't provide a good enough alternative to that.
After playing without a guide and figuring out enough of the story, I went through and tried all the commands in the walkthrough. There's certainly some fun in that, with how many different commands are implemented, but it's just not structured in a way that makes it interesting. The lack of a goal makes it particularly problematic.
This game reminds of Her Story. You have to piece together what is going on by watching short video clips. I think Her Story is basically a better version of this game because it actually has a goal and actually has a flow and pace to it. Stuff changes in the "meta" game as you discover important bits of information. Having, at the very least, a meta layer might've made Aisle more interesting for me.
All of that aside, it's quite short and you can play it in the space of an hour. This, alone, is it's most redeeming quality (and I don't mean that in the sense of "it's great it's short because it SUCKS"). It gives you a complete, fully-realized, unique experience all in the course of an hour.
I give this three stars because, despite my lack of engagement with it, it was short and unique. I would recommend this, because what do you really have to lose with a game this short?
Read Doulgas Adams' books instead, November 29, 2015The puzzles are absolutely stupid. There are plenty of more enjoyable games you could play instead of this. People say you should play this for the writing, but I would say you're not really missing much, and you're certainly not spending your free time effectively by trying to figure out these stupid puzzles. If you want to enjoy Douglas Adams' writing, read his books.
You will have to save often and reload often. You might even find yourself in a situation where you have to revert to a save much earlier in the game due to the game becoming unwinnable without you realizing it, causing you to have to play large sections of the game over again. A game designed around saving and reloading is acceptable as long as the interface for performing those actions is fast and makes it easy to see where you're going to end up and makes it easy to restore to specific points. Of course, this game doesn't do anything in that regard. It's up to you to create descriptive file names. Just unnecessary busy work.
The puzzles are just ridiculously bad and unenjoyable. There's so many other games that do puzzles in a much better and more enjoyable way. It would even be possible to maintain Douglas Adams' brand of humor and style without making these puzzles so stupid.
If you seriously want to try to solve this game with a guide, and you persist even after so many saves and reloads and so many hours spent without making progress, you should seriously stop and ask yourself what the hell you are doing with your life. Do you value your time? You only have a short time here on Earth, and maybe you only have a small amount of free time to play games. You should play games that are fun. You are unlikely to have as much fun playing this game as you are many other games. Put this stupid game down and find something more fun.
If you still think you want to play this game, do NOT hesitate to use a guide. I give this two stars only because of the unique style and writing that Douglas Adams brings to this game. It has a few small, funny moments. But, as a game, it's just doesn't provide even a remotely acceptable amount of enjoyment per minute.
Thorough, polished, and usable, but sometimes challenging in a frustrating way, November 28, 2015This is one of the first few IF games I've played, so that's where I'm coming from.
I enjoyed the writing and story.
Overall, the parser had all sorts of useful features that made it much less frustrating and more enjoyable than other IF that lacks those sorts of features. I rarely had difficulty figuring out how to get the character to do what I wanted, something I can't say for the few other IF games I've played.
In particular, I appreciated the great space of possibilities achievable through word-manipulation that the game actually accounts for, even if it isn't directly relevant to advancing the story.
There's 2 main reasons I didn't give this five stars:
First, I encountered a few small bugs. One that particularly annoyed me was that the "exit" command didn't work inside the University. Additionally, (Spoiler - click to show)on the ship at the end of the game, the look command made no mention of a wardrobe (or at least it wasn't highlighted in bold if you turned that feature on), but you need to open the wardrobe in order to progress. How is that supposed to be fun?. Those two are my primary reasons for docking a star because they frustrated me due to making it unnecessarily difficult to progress. Most of the other bugs I encountered were related to missing content but had no affect on the gameplay.
Second, especially as the game goes on and your inventory grows, I found some of the puzzles to be more frustrating than enjoyable. I was holding so many items because I had no idea what would be useful, but this made it harder to figure out what I was supposed to use to solve a particular challenge because it increases the pool of objects you have to pick from - complicated by the fact that each object can potentially be transformed into other objects using word manipulation.
One particular puzzle that frustrated me was the one in the middle of the roundabout where teens are chained up and there's an all purpose officer. I eventually looked up the solution after spending far longer than I'd like to admit on it. (Spoiler - click to show)I was told that I couldn't do anything that would make me suspicous. So why could I grab the gun and shoot the tree? Also, it seemed that the solution hinged on looking at the tree with your monocle. I had mine off, I think because I had to remove it to avoid detection earlier. I understand that it makes sense to always have your monocle on if possible, but, due to the large space of possible things to try in this situation, it makes it far less reasonable to expect someone to guess that they need to use their monocle on a perfectly innocuous tree. The only hint you get is that the all-purpose officer has been transforming things. You have to deduce from that that you should check for more transformed things, but that wouldn't be my first suspicion. Especially because I would expect a tree to be at that location. There's also lots of red herrings - the octopus, the statue itself, the signet - all of which are bolded objects but have nothing to do with the solution. Also, the officer's actions made me think I had to do something at a specific time or else the game would become unwinnable - like I had to do something while they were climbing or something. There's all sorts of stuff that could throw you off..
In general, I would say that, while some of these solutions may seem obvious in retrospect, you have to account for the state you are in before arriving there - you have potentially a lot of items. You have all sorts of different people and different actions to try. Sometimes you'll try an action but be given an explanation for why you can't do that, so you may develop an assumption about what you can and cannot try that leads you to never try something that was the solution all along. Puzzle games attempt to prevent this type of frustration by limiting the space of options you have to explore and/or providing small hints towards the solution. As a developer, you can't always rely on your own judgement to decide whether something will be fair or not too frustrating.
I don't know what went into the development of this game, but I suspect the puzzle frustration issues could've been revealed with a bit of testing from someone who didn't already know the solutions. As far as design, decreasing the amount of options available to you, having less unrelated objects and red herrings in the rooms involving the puzzle (because there's already enough with all the crap you have in your inventory), and providing more subtle hints would've helped keep me from getting frustrated with some of the puzzles. Overall, I felt like I spent a bit more time than I would've wanted not making any progress while trying to solve some of the puzzles.
That aside, it's still a great game and I enjoyed playing it; it just got a little too frustrating at times. I usually do well at puzzle games (they happen to be my favorite genre as far as video games go), though I'm new to IF, so I wouldn't blame the challenges I faced on my own inability. I'm fine with having difficulty with a puzzle - it's possible to have lots of difficult puzzles WITHOUT causing frustration and hurting the enjoyment of a game. I just don't think this game consistently achieves that.
All told, I would say I enjoyed about 85% of the time I spent with this game, so I definitely recommend this. Had some of the puzzles been designed more to be challenging without being frustrating, I would've probably enjoyed it a lot more.
Fun, but occasionally too slow, November 25, 2015Fun to play in short bursts or to give you something interesting to do during a long commute. The UI works decently well for mobile, unlike most parser-based IF.
There's not a lot of text or descriptions in the game (by IF standards). There's no graphics. There's just words, numbers and sometimes ASCII symbols. Despite the lack of text content, I myself still able to paint a mental picture of what was occurring. In some ways, the lack of concise description makes this easier and invites you to participate more in immersing yourself in the world.
As far as actual gameplay (without spoiling much), there's a lot of variety in what you do as you progress through the game. Not just in terms of the actions you take in the game, but in how you interact with the game itself. There's lots of downtime, especially as you get further in the game, while you wait for timers to tick down. As a pacing device, I think it works okay, since it gives you long moments of not having to make tough decisions or having to focus too hard on what's going on. However, I still felt a bit bored by the amount of time I was expected to wait for certain things to get done. It's hard to explain this "waiting around" mechanic well - I feel like there's some positive aspects to it that I'm not able to describe. Usually, I have no patience for games that make you do repetitive tasks for long periods of time. However, there's something about the presentation and text-heavy nature of this game that makes this more forgivable and somehow seems to enhance the game. I feel it wouldn't be as substantial or enjoyable if they cut all the timers out.
Anyway, if you're looking for something you can play on your phone that actually works comfortably on such a device, you should give this a try. You can play it whenever you have downtime and, despite the inherently repetitive nature of the "incremental" gameplay, it will still mete out just enough new content and story that you'll probably want to keep playing to see more.
I give this 3 stars because I had fun playing it. However, I had points where I was outright bored by having to sit there and wait for timers to tick down. Also, this isn't really a substantial experience compared to other IF. There's really not a lot of text content here and I felt the story was pretty sparse. More content and variety would've bumped up the rating, for me.
Large but unfriendly, November 23, 2015I have no idea what I am doing in this game, even after playing for several hours. It certainly has a lot of stuff in it, but that doesn't necessarily make it fun to play. I find it tedious to navigate through the 1000+ rooms only to die and have to find my way back to where I was. I want to give a piece of armor to my companion. I can't just say "give armor to <companion name>" - it recognizes that I have typed the command but it tells me that I must first unequip it. Obviously you know what I wanted to do so why not just unequip it for me and give it to my companion? There's are just a few small examples pointing at a larger pattern of letting the clunkiness get in the way of being able to explore the game.
I definitely would consider this to be a sandbox. So, if you are interested in just exploring and discovering, you may get some enjoyment out of this. But just know that the mechanics and general clunkiness of the interface are going to make it less-than-pleasant to work with.
I give this 2 stars just on the merit of having a lot of content in it. You can't go wrong with putting a ton of stuff in a game. But the aforementioned issues overall hurt the experience. That said, it's one of the first few IF games I've played, so perhaps I don't have the breadth of experience to know if it's really 2 stars when compared to other games...
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