Reviews by Rovarsson
SF
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Space Station Escape, October 19, 2020This, ladies and gentlemen, is good work!
"Fragile Shells" is an excellently made text escape game. It consists of a series of interconnected puzzles, all of them solvable by using logic, common sense and a ready knowledge of basic physics.
Maybe too easy for some, but I found that the layering of one puzzle onto another, linking their solutions together into one clear chain from the givens to the conclusion was very satisfying indeed.
Just about every command I tried had a meaningful response, a very friendly game indeed.
Add to this an exciting backstory remembered in bits and pieces by the protagonist to frame it, and you get a short and delightful IF-gem.
Good Golly Miss Molly!, September 27, 2020A good story-driven game with easy puzzles and a menu-based conversation system, so nothing gets in the way of defeating the Brainguzzlers and saving your 1950s American Smalltown.
I really liked the game for the first half hour of play. After that the caricature of 1950s scifi horror, and of 1950s American society began to wear me down. I began half expecting The Jetsons coming down in a UFO of their own to drop off the Fonz who would then save the day.
I also doubt that "Jeepers!" would last long as the swearword of choice during an alien attack.
Technically, the game is very well put together. The scripted conversations are perfect for an uptempo story like this. Intro, middle and endgame are well paced. I would have liked some more implementation of scenery, but that would have slowed the game down, so it's understandable. What did bug me, and slowed the game down is the lack of synonyms available. A fast-paced story-game like this would have benefited from a wide choice of different names for your items so you didn't have to stop to remember how something was called in the description. I hated that in a scifi setting such as this, "blaster" was not recognized.
Probably best played in one go, straight through to the (slimy) ending.
Large, engrossing,... and somewhat lacking., September 21, 2020Emily Short is one of my favourite IF-writers, and when I found this big story-game with her name under the title, I pounced on it!
And it is good. Apart from being an immersive adventure and a detailed exploration of a fine city, deeper themes also shine through.
Truth above obscurity, even if truth also means complete transparency?
Creativity above strict order, even if creativity also means chaos?
The writing is top-notch, the NPC interactions feel real, the city and its history hold the interest, but in the end, the game misses something.
Is it because the game is so good that I raised the bar impossibly high?
Finding an outdoor café where there were no interactive NPCs and where nothing story-moving happened disappointed me.
Finding out that a little nook in the gameworld, about which I dreamed up many possibilities, didn't play a role in the story didn't feel like a red herring, it felt like a let-down.
Finding out that certain information I found about my character didn't matter to the game was a pity.
But those are nitpicks, and very personal nitpicks at that.
This game is very very good. Just not as amazing as I really really wanted it to be. And that's on me.
So play it.
Prime Directive, anyone?, September 18, 2020The overarching theme of "The Orion Agenda" is an exploration of the implications of the Star Trek prime directive (not interfering with the natural evolution of technologically lesser developed cultures). Aah, many an hour have I spent waxing philosophically about this question after a Trek-marathon with friends...
The game is nicely structured: a light and funny bureaucratic puzzle to begin with, a somewhat harder midgame (that makes excellent use of the flashback), and a slight twist in the finale, where you also need to use the insights from the midgame.
NPCs mostly do what they have to, no more, except Rebecca, your partner, whom you can order around a bit. (REBECCA, JUMP)
I know it's not for everyone, but I like me some text dumps. Here, you get a SciCorps manual with your equipment and some screenfulls at the end of the game to summarize the moral dilemma.
A good game worth mulling over a bit after you're done.
Classic Second Era., December 8, 2019Babel. What a game. During my first tentative journeys into IF-land, I stumbled across this deep, dark psychological horrorstory. I recently replayed it and it's still as haunting as it was then.
Do not riff on Babel for using the amnesia-trope. I have seldom seen it used so effectively as a source of suspense in IF. No lazy author here, but a tried and true storytelling technique that takes the reader down into the deep with it. Think Dr. Jeckyl.
Early modern IF that it is, Babel sometimes relies heavily on non-interactive scenes to make sure the player sees the whole story. I don't mind this one bit, I am as much a reader as a player, but I know this bothers some people.
The story is great, albeit not very original in this genre. Well told, well paced. The surroundings are fantastic, I thought. Varied enough to avoid feeling buried in a tunnel, without losing the thrill of the dungeon-feel.
The puzzles are not so hard, as long as you are patient enough to stick to The Adventurers Code: Read! Explore! Examine!
All in all, a true classic of the modern age.
Don your supersuit and try it out!, December 7, 2019This is a very short but enjoyable game.
The first part is mostly an introduction to the characters. You talk to your brother via a choice-menu, which gives the author the chance to put a lot of the brother-sister dynamics into the conversations. Downside is the almost mechanical ticking off of options.
In this part you can also experiment to your hearts content with the powersuit you found. Very much fun!
The second part switches quite abruptly to a big boss-fight. Use the skills you've learned to subdue the monster.
That's it. Short, easy, fun. That's all you need sometimes.
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