Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

(warning: while I do not spoil any specific puzzles, this review talks about the underlying weirdness, for lack of a better word, of the game)

The start of this game threw me into a wholly unexpected situation. From the (quickly skimmed) blurb I had taken away that Rover's Day Out would be a space adventure of sorts. Instead I got dropped in a fairly generic "my crappy apartment" intro. Complete with an annoying alarm clock waking me up!

That is... Until I started noticing things...

Most obviously, who are those people talking about me as if I were in another room. Am I? I sure can't seem to talk to them or interact with them in any way.

And... What's happening with the status bar? I'm used to glancing up there for confirmation of which room I'm in. This is different though... Some kind of technobabble straight from Enterprise's ship's computer. It's responding to the boring around-the-house chores I'm doing though...

Wait... There are those voices again, talking about me in the bathroom. One's being a prude about looking at me. But no-one's here...

And then the whole thing collapses when I tried to turn on the dryer.

Rover's Day Out is a 2009 game. It feels older though. This kind of confusing layering of player/PC personas reminds me a lot of the turn of the century experiments with the specifics of the IF medium.

The author uses the an AI-simulation to create a rift between the PC's perception, which consists of a recreation of the morning ritual of one of the designers, and the engineers/designers who judge the AI's performance from outside, in the real world.
During the game, the player shifts somewhere between these levels of perception and knowledge. From being confronted with a domestic breakfast situation, I quickly latched on to the simulation context through cues from the game. My knowledge becomes greater than that of my PC. The commands I give still need to be approriate in the PC's perceived reality however. This produces an alienating feeling of both inhabiting the PC and hovering above it. When the simulation-protocols are partially lifted during the endgame, this alienation is enhanced by an even greater disconnect between PC-perception and valid commands.

The fact that I, the player, am able to overhear the engineers talking about my, the PC's, performance broadens the gap even more, even while I'm consciously striving to bridge that gap and stay connected with my PC.

There are a few points where the partial overlap between player and PC is less than perfectly recognized in the game's responses, and sometimes I had a hard time discerning just what level of reality the description I was reading was about. Once I fully grokked the one-on-one relation between simulated and real objects though, the puzzles clicked quite easily and elegantly.

Confusing in a very good way. Must play.

When I saw Space Oddysey 2001 for the first time (and the times after that, now I come to think of it...) HAL scared the brains out of me. The calm, collected voice-pattern, the ruthless efficiency, the cold determination...

Nah, I like his sister a lot more. Ok, she sounds at least as disturbing as her big brother, but at least I can picture myself having a fun night on the town with her.

(For no reason other than my own imagination, I perceived SOLIS as female.)

SOLIS welcomes you as you stumble onto her decks, on the run for the space police because... Well, you're a thief. Plain and simple. And your FTL-jump thingamajig had a small hiccup so you ended up here with a lonely AI in an abandoned spaceship.

Contrary to HAL, SOLIS does have a distinctly, erm... outgoing personality. In fact, sometimes she sounds like her personality is a bit too much for her to handle. Like it's growing out of her circuits, fizzing and crackling...

The more I engaged with SOLIS, the more it became clear that there were hidden depths underneath her humorous façade. As if she was using robotic indifference, AI-superiority and sarcasm as a shield from the utter desolation of her situation and from traumatic aspects within herself.
SOLIS is easily one of my dearest NPCs ever. Conversing with her, getting to know her was a great joy.

In comparison, the PC comes close to an empty shell at first. Sure, we get a bit of background to establish we're a thief but not a nasty one, but for the rest, the protagonist is a mask for the player. During the course of the game however, and especially through communicating with SOLIS, the player has ample choice to characterize the PC. I personally went for friendly pitbull (be nice if possible but bite down on any questions the NPC seems reluctant to talk about).

In fact, the entire game is well suited to this sort of featureless protagonist. At its core,A Long Way to the Nearest Star is a very old school adventure. Find codes and tools to solve clever puzzles and unlock previously inaccessible regions of the spaceship. While the obstacles are mostly engaging enough to make this fun in its own right, the gradually unveiling of the backstory is the real reward.

Pretty standard for an old school text adventure. But it's implemented in Twine. The biggest consequence of this is that the level of interaction with the game-world is slightly higher order, less hands-on. Compared to a parser, the player has not nearly as much freedom to juggle the inventory and throw every imaginable verb at the poor objects. Instead of a compass, there are room-connections in unspecified directions. This didn't keep me from drawing a map.

Still, even though the player is clicking to advance through the game, the focus is very much on which actions to undertake, as opposed to navigating a branching narrative space. The choice format makes the conversations flow naturally. Many options differ only in tone, serving to characterize the protagonist. There are choices that can significantly influence SOLIS attitude and behaviour too. These, together with some PC actions during the game can lead to diverse endings.

I liked how the UI, with its boxed and highlighted options, mirrored my mental image of the screens and terminals the protagonist is confronted with throughout the game. For those who might find this too intrusive, the style is customizable in the gear-menu.

A polished and exciting science fiction game. Recommended.

Oh! I had a lot of fun with this.

A seemingly simple objective that leads to all kinds of shenanigans. Who knew getting ready to go out the door could set up so many hoops to jump through.

It’s mostly pretending you’re actually in this situation and turning the living room upside down and inside out to find your stuff, but turned up to eleven.There are a few small puzzles, nothing extraordinary but fun.

The game shines in all the details that bring up distractions, or memories and stray thoughts that provide a little backstory. Somewhat more serious are the reminders that this game was made with COVID measures still firmly in mind. But then you’re searching the sofa and laughing again.

Instead of an impersonal hint-system, you have the exasperated but loving and forgiving voice of your partner answering you from upstairs when you SHOUT.

Finding the winning ending is not hard as long as you look hard enough. However, there are 18 other “losing” endings where you have to think more or less out of the box, some hilarious, some just silly. And then there is one optimal ending for which the game drops some sledgehammer clues, so it’s not that hard to find either. It’s very sweet.

Half an hour of fun, pure and simple.

“We’re too young for nostalgia, sparrow.
Go live a life worth reminiscing about.”

These are the final lines of the introductory paragraphs. An incitement to explore the nooks and crannies of this narrative urban maze.

During the first dialogue, I was immediately drawn to the protagonist and their companion. The little inklings of their hidden personalities dropped by the author made me thirsty to learn more of their personal histories and their place in this world.
The setting their meeting takes place in is equally intruiging. There are precious hints of a sprawling city with simultaneously mystifying yet familiar inner workings. Technomagical engineering seems to take the place of our cogs and gears, but the story remains vague about the ratio of familiar cause-and-effect and magical interference. There is mention of storm-powered “jolt” resembling static electricity but also of a crystal with strange workings.

During the story, the player is presented with several situations which increase the narrative tension. There is ample opportunity to shape the personality of the protagonist through the choices of which action to take, and in doing so, to determine the future, the outcome of the story.

I took a conservative path on my first (only, so far) playthrough, choosing to lay low and let the big problems and mysteries be handled by those perhaps better suited to heroic interference with the powers that be.
I learned a lot about the people of Conduin, the great city, and about the power dynamics that drive their society. I survived to live perhaps not heroic, but content with my role.

No point reminiscing about the time you got killed for poking your nose too far where it doesn’t belong…

Very good speculative fiction. I’m gonna go exploring more now, perhaps indeed poking in some darker corners…

A mysterious light
Burns all through the night
In that house where some people say
An alchemist dwells
With books of his spells
And a cat who scares children away

The game's mood is firmly set with this poem by Gareth Owen. The author picks up hereafter with a well-written introduction reminiscent of late 1800s Gothic Mystery stories.

You received a letter from your alchemist friend. (I want to rename our black cat after him. Ezekiel Throgmeister is a very cool name!) He had to interrupt work on an ongoing experiment for an urgent meeting with his colleagues in the arcane arts. The fact that apparently he did have the time to organize a scavenger hunt around his mansion, scattering clues all over the place instead of leaving everything in the lobby where you would immediately find them necessitates some fastening of the suspenders of disbelief. But this is just a flimsy frame for the true point of the game of course.

The Alchemist takes place in one of the most visited and beloved of adventure settings: the abandoned mansion. Despite the gloomy atmosphere, I felt right at home. Cozy almost...
Befitting the setting, the game is basically an old-school loot-and-drop quest. You need to find all components of an alchemical experiment and gather them in the laboratory.

Once the game proper starts, the writing leaves behind the elaborate Gothic stylings of the introduction. It becomes stark and sparse, efficiently describing your surroundings and the objects of note in them. The author mostly drops any unnecessary clutter, while still retaining the gloom of the shady mansion.
He accomplishes this by incorporating poignant details in the rooms, and by augmenting the descriptions with some random filler text and some rare and surprising timed sound effects ((Spoiler - click to show)I loved the purring cat!).

There is a large number of varied clues and puzzles. Common sense will get you started. There are devices to transform stuff, magical barriers and potions. A book found early on has a few rhyming riddles to figure out. None of this is too hard, and there is a good in-game hint system should you get stuck.
There is a clever trick the author pulls which creates a puzzle-barrier in the player's own mind. He gets you so used to a certain routine to follow and progress in the game, that the hardest puzzle for me was recognizing when to break that routine and try something else than I'd been doing. Very satisfying to break out of that box.

The map is large but not overwhelmingly so. It's subdivided into clearly alineated areas with their own collection of puzzles. I liked the click in the endgame when a part of the geography fell into place in my mind.

The Alchemist is a large and fun old-school adventure. Trustworthy and solid.

What can I say? I was grinning ear to ear the whole time.

I went through a goal-oriented first playthrough, making choices that I felt confident would bring me closer to the mice’s objective. Meanwhile I marveled at the pretty pictures and the smooth writing. (Writing in little-children-sentences is not an easy feat.)

Then I doubled the fun. I began behaving like a tricksy recalcitrant toddler, purposely choosing to stuff everything in my mouth instead of moving toward the goal. And I laughed…

Heartwarming and funny.