Reviews by Wynter
Parser puzzles
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An odyssey of puzzles, January 16, 2024One day, completely out of the blue, you get a phone call from Rachel Kessler, the sister of your old university room-mate, Martin. He's gone missing, and she needs someone to find him. Preferably someone weird, which is why she called you. Because Martin and his family are very unusual people - inventors, scientists and dreamers - and it takes an unusual person to get inside his mind, and find out where he has gone. On your journey, you travel to the other side of the world, to outer space, to the past, and to the future, aided by hints from the myriad pop culture references that Wennstrom has scattered throughout her game.
What attracts me to big games like this is not only brainteasing, satisfying puzzles, but also a meaningful, complex storyline. Finding Martin has both - but this is a hard act to pull off. Most people's lives do not involve solving puzzles in order to do basic things. So in order to make the story convincing, you have to be able to justify why these obstacles exist in the context of the story and its characters, rather than just for the sake of having puzzles for the player to solve. In the case of Finding Martin, the puzzles are justified by the fact that Martin and his father are eccentric inventors, people who, instead of having a door like normal people, would open a room using (Spoiler - click to show)a bust of Beethoven with responsive features. More and more of the house, and the map in general, opens up as you figure out how the Kessler family home works.
In the earlier part of the game, we only once or twice get a hint of how the player character feels about Martin - his work identity card doesn't really look like the happy young man you remember, and the closet is as messy as you'd expect. It would be good to have some flashbacks which shed light on your own relationship with him. But as the game develops, some very long narrative portions start to put together who Martin is, and who his friends and family members are. There is a long backstory about Martin's childhood, the death of his father, and what exactly he was working on; and as you progress, not only do you learn parts of this story and about the relationships between the characters, you also get to involve yourself in them as well. The scene in the (Spoiler - click to show)Sweet transformation is particularly well-written, as you can move to different parts of the scene and watch different groups of characters interact.
This is a nicely non-linear game. The map becomes increasingly larger as you go on, and there are often several lines of enquiry open to you at once. This means that you have more than one thing to work on when you get stuck, although sometimes it's not apparent which are dead ends and which puzzles can be solved right now. There are a few hint systems, and the narrative voice sometimes spells things out that would not otherwise be obvious, such as suggesting that (Spoiler - click to show)a pocket watch belongs in a pocket. I would have been lost without the walkthrough, but the game was engaging enough for me to keep persevering with it, and it was always a great pleasure when I managed to solve a difficult puzzle by myself.
Overall, Finding Martin is staggeringly well-implemented, nearly every part working perfectly like clockwork. The (Spoiler - click to show)time travel trips, particular the Sour transformations, work particularly beautifully, although I never really got the hang of (Spoiler - click to show)the fuzzy cube, which not only seemed to have entirely arbitrary workings, but sometimes wouldn't behave the same way twice even under identical circumstances, and (Spoiler - click to show)the dream at the very end, where I found myself needing to go back to an earlier save file because for some reason the correct actions didn't work.
How do you approach this game? With patience, a sense of humour, and a willingness to try things. Start off by examining, looking in, looking under, and looking behind everything you can see. Once you've found the (Spoiler - click to show)watch and have figured out what it can do, it's worth taking some time to explore every single possible setting and copy and paste into a document every response that you get from it. Yes, that will take a long time. You're in this for the long haul, but the early work will pay off. Much of what you discover will be a hint for solving a puzzle, whether immediately or later on. And enjoy the ride. Take some time to read those long cut-scenes (and, again, save copies), get to know the various characters, keep your eyes open for clues, and start piecing together the story. Because that's when the game becomes something more than just a series of amusing puzzles to be solved, but instead the story of a young man suffering the loss of an eccentric but beloved father.
Just the puzzle game I needed, February 5, 2023NOTE: as explained below, I think there are a couple of bugs in the "play online" versions: read on if you are stuck.
I'd been looking for a new, medium/large puzzle game to play, but I often find parsers difficult and slow to get off the ground, and tend to give up on them very quickly. First Things First finally broke this streak.
You are off to return your time travel books to the library when you discover that you've locked yourself out of the house. Quite coincidentally, an actual time machine materialises in your neighbourhood (you accept this in a somewhat matter-of-fact way), allowing you to visit a further four time periods, starting from before the house was built, and ending in an apparently dystopian future.
The puzzles are pitched at just the right level: difficult enough to get me thinking, but not so hard that I gave up. Notably, they are often of the kind where, just when you think you have solved the problem, another barrier turns out to be in the way, and what was apparently a simple goal gets further and further away: truly infuriating and deeply satisfying. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, you try to plant a tree. One bottle of Miracle-Grow is not enough to get it to grow large enough, so you need to figure out a way of taking all the bottles. When that's done, it turns out still not to be enough, so another bottle has to be acquired. The tree allows you to get into an otherwise unreachable part of the map to pick up an object which you had been looking for, but the next problem is getting out, and so on. Some puzzles have more than one solution.
The game was written with real attention to detail: it's a joy to see how the descriptions of different parts of the map change as you alter the past and the future. The tone shifts a great deal, encompassing tranquillity (the woodlands that were there before the house was built), urgency (long passages of dialogue with a major character at a crucial part in the game) and occasionally terror(Spoiler - click to show): there is one surprisingly unnerving sequence, which some players might miss, where you grow the tree to its full extent and fix the roof but do not install a lightning conductor, and then go into the +10-year future and attempt to climb the tree. The game goes to considerable lengths to instil a sense of growing panic as you lose your grip, and fall to the ground, leaving you alive but unable to move. Playing with (Spoiler - click to show)the bank while having time travel abilities is also great fun.
However, I ran into a wall at an important point in the story: in the section called "Outside the Executive VP's Office", the game froze: in the middle of a block of text, there should have been a "press any key" option and there wasn't! I was using the Parchment interpreter on iplayif.com (the "Play Online" option above) - there seems to be something wrong with it. So I restarted using the elseif player ("Play Online in Browser"), which has a separate window for typing in commands, and that did the trick.
Unusually for me, I didn't need to resort to a walkthrough: the in-game hints were enough. However, I ended up consulting it because, close to the end, I got stuck in a loop which may be a bug because it doesn't make sense as a deliberate way to get the player stuck. (Spoiler - click to show)If you just walk into the museum, the young man will offer you a tour, but there is no way of accepting it: typing "yes" or "follow young man" just lead him to repeat his offer; you can't even move beyond this point. I checked the walkthrough and discovered that there is a note underneath the doormat, instructing you to knock on the door. If you do so, you can type "yes" in response to the man's questions, and "follow young man" should work also.
It looks as if First Things First has been relatively underappreciated in the twenty years since it came out, and undeservedly so. If you're looking for a well-thought-out puzzle game that will neither be a pushover nor impossibly taxing, this could be the one.
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