Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

You should think your parents would be proud of your advancements in rocket science and pyrotechnics, what with all the effort you put into your experiments. Ok, a tad more forethought might have left the now-wrecked shed in the backyard standing, but still...
But no! They decided to send you on a punishment mining mission to teach you some responsibility...

For all the whimsical slapstick style of the introduction, Grounded in Space quickly turns into a more serious space-faring mission. En route to the family asteroid mining claim, the game allows you ample time to familiarize yourself with the ship's functions. And you'll need it.

After a first mining puzzle where you figure out the (well clued) sequence of commands needed to operate the ship's heavy equipment, the story twists around and turns into a rescue mission. There are multiple possible endings, all more or less intuitive once you use your imagination and think about what a young bright lad on a massive mining spaceship has at hand.

The development of the story through its escalating levels of engagement works nicely. The narrative timing draws the player in while increasing the tension, but still leaves enough room for experimenting, exploring the ship's interior and its equipment.

There is one geometric/logic puzzle that completely baffled me. The game attempts to aid you in visualizing it with a rudimentary grid and detailed description, but without actually seeing the results of my interventions I could not get a grip on it. (There's a walkthrough by the author on the IFDB site.)

The endings were perhaps a bit predictable, but the satisfaction of finding that last move to save the day (at least partly, with more or less collateral damage depending on your chosen tactic) more than makes up for this.

A great SF game with good narrative development.

Blegh! You came so close last time! So close, but then Satan caught you escaping and threw you back. Stuffed in the body of a lowly counting clerk no less! Fortunately, you feel your powers of possession growing...

You are Zgarblurg (how's that for a malevolent-sounding name...), a demon spirit intent on escaping from Hell. To accomplish this, you must use your power to possess other entities.Fortunately, this particular version of Hell houses just the right creatures whose powers might aid you with your cunning plan (which you will make up as you go along...)

This Hell is a peculiar place, consisting of several regions. You start off in Accounting, move on to a large section loosely inspired by Dante's Inferno and Greek mythology (remember that one time where Orpheus got tangled up in brocolli stalks...), and confront the Princes of Darkness in their palace (which kinda made me think of a college frat house...)

The map is large but not sprawling. It's completely geometric (rectangular) in shape. Many areas are cleverly gated off so your exploration will require some inventive puzzle-solving skills.

I should mention here that the game was developed in a custom engine of the author's own making that closely resembles Gruescript and Versificator, as it is important for the following discussion of puzzles, pacing and map-traversal. These game engines present you with fine-grain options for which actions to take, along with accessible compass directions,resulting in a very parser-like gameplay experience. The available actions have been pre-selected by the author depending on the creature you are possessing and the location you're in.

The game provides an adaptive map grid that grows with the locations you've discovered. Along with the buttons for compass directions, you can click on any location on the map repeatedly to move your player to that square turn by turn. At first this felt like a great feature for player comfort. However, since almost all puzzles depend on bringing the right creature to the appropriate puzzle-location, the map-clicking feature soon felt very mechanical and gnawed away at my engagement. I quickly reverted to clicking the compass buttons as they gave me more of a sense of active navigation. Still, there's a lot of going back-and-forth across the map to switch creatures and positioning them, even if you have a clear objective in mind. When you're stuck and aimlessly wandering, the clicking interface pushed me out of the immersion faster than typing in directions in a parser would have done. (But this is probably just me bringing my parser-bias into a click game.)

The puzzles are fair once you get to know your creature's abilities. Some are decidedly elegant, providing a flash of insight or the satisfaction of a well-prepared plan working out just as you imagined. A nice variety too, with turn/timed sequences, unlocking gates with a twist, some surprising uses of objects. A few obstacles require a bit of background knowledge of Hades or the Inferno, but nothing that a bit of determined trial-and-error couldn't take care of.
There was only one puzzle that has me stumped even after I asked for hints:
-(Spoiler - click to show)The sacrifices to the Moirae. The fact that they want food offerings is well-clued. The colour-coding I understand. But how to deduce the order in which to give Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos their snacks completely eludes me even now.

Although I do think the puzzles are fair, many of them felt ever so slightly underclued. This is another instance where I missed the freedom of the parser to poke around, hoping that fail-responses to PULL, MOVE, LICK or KICK would nudge me in the right direction. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, a simple DRINK WATER on the banks of the Lethe or even SWIM IN LETHE would eliminate any need for background mythological knowledge. (Again, probably just me and my parser sensibilities.)

Once you have penetrated the Palace of the Dark Princes after a fair amount of puzzling, the pace picks up as you confront each of the six Devils (originally seven, but Belphegor couldn't be bothered...). It'sa lot of fun to figure ut their respective weak points and concoct a plan for their undoing.

An engaging and challenging puzzler with some hilarious moments. My main source of enjoyment was how the game invited me to dream up creative (if far-fetched) solutions to the problems it poses. I felt my brain engaging with the obstacles in the background even when away from the screen.

(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.