Reviews by kaemi

What’s gone isn’t gone but radiates your negative space. The last little enclosure you’ve fortressed, the “scream” where “the silence and darkness vanish”, haunts the stranded your uninhabitable.

Our metaphor, then, a space station held at arms’ length from unreachable life, transcribes complex emotions with the swift immediacy of shorthand. The writing’s percussive simplicity carries the pulse to steady rhythm. “In this voyage through horizonless landscapes, / I reach out toward memories” imposes the central conundrum, you cannot escape what you cannot leave behind, in an efficiency which elicits the engineer’s expression of elegance. Tight designs demand minimum torque at each joint, a soft touch that trusts each piano echoes the awaiting of the room. The game achieves this simplicity at several points, softfocusing stars to snowflakes to scintillate the composing metaphor, spacestation to the hollows in the home, with a few fleet delights like a child’s wonder of astroneering clashing against the father’s architectural supersedence furnishing just enough justification to satisfy the sole puzzle.

Unfortunately, acceleration towards a climax tempts our author towards explanations. Initially, this merely flattens the affect, with the old man explaining everything we’ve intuited since scene one in prose that struggles to add anything by adding anything. Sadly, this frustration accelerates alike to the climax, with the grand revelation annihilating the accumulated artistry: “It’s a photo of a child — not me — with my father and a woman I don’t recognize. The child, whose features resemble those of the old man from the ship, is wearing a birthday hat. On the photo, there’s a date: February 12th, the second part of my father’s password. If the child is the old man, he ate this corpse and hid it in his secret room.” The first sentence hits the gas, and for a moment everything holds together, but the swerving of the second and third sentence, haphazardly hazarding what we could very well guess, crashes in the ridiculous fourth sentence to a fireball from which we may only hope to Romain Grosjean.

Like its spacestation, the purpose of The journey is to be suspended gracefully in negative space. We should resolve its central conundrum through affirmation of the tensions: “I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.” The empty spaces have a function, Dad, not least that they must contain you.

The nuclear deterrent is frequently misunderstood as mutually assured destruction through glistening missile arrays just a trigger finger away from apocalypse. In reality, the nuclear deterrent disincentivizes proliferation primarily through the heartstarching inevitability of some undertrained overexcited gutreactor yaketysaxing cascading radioreactive incompetencies to chainreacted gigachernobyl grayouts. Did you know there are currently dozens of unexploded nuclear bombs lying on the seafloor? It just was kind of a routine thing during the Cold War, whoops, there goes another one.

Lockout’s nuclear submarine bears this rich legacy proudly. A desk in the engine controls has railings that “are useful to keep people from accidentally knocking things off the desk … one has to walk past the railing carefully because a piece came loose when Butterfingers wanted to show he could jump over it.” Perhaps we could have foreseen an issue when we entrusted our nuclear deterrent to Butterfingers, but then again, it seems we’ve not foreseen much of anything. The game’s setpiece puzzle is that the automated disaster response automatically seals off the engine room, stranding you, which raises several questions like, why would you do that, why do we even want to abandon our station in the engine room during an electrical incident, how is this the second time this has happened on this voyage, maybe we should just spend our tax dollars on roads or something. Moreover, an emergency red light strobes you blinded, so literally the first step in disaster response is shutting off the disaster response so you can respond to the disaster. More questions emerge as we do respond to the disaster, like why is the wheel that opens the tool cabinet impossible to open, why is there no battery in the door controls, how come almost everything we need to do was already covered in training and we’ve clearly learned none of it.

The answer is, as you’ve guessed, it’s an escape room, fiddly dependencies pushing you to seek out square one forms the throughline. Once you’ve opened the door, the rest is shrugged: “You make your way out of the door, and find your crewmates in tight concentration on the command deck. You work out a plan and manage to preserve the vessel and your lives.” The room itself, then, fine. There’s some reasonable text adventury finicking, and I generally enjoy the genre of patiently simulate a diegetic skill. The issue that shortfuses this fun is blurriness, a vague sense of uncontact with each system you manipulate. Interactions can struggle with the daunting of their implementation, as when you need to search through training logs, but the desk with the training logs awkwardly rebuffs you: “The papers from the desk seem to be notes from various training exercises. You arrange them neatly on the desk so you can read them if you want to, but they seem meaty, so you’d prefer knowing whether any of them are relevant before you read them.” You already have to know which ones you want to read, which you find out by reading all of them one by one in the logbook to find out which ones you want to read, which causes them somehow to show up in the desk, which you can’t search, but you can just read? Similarly, at several points you pull up a help screen on the smaller screen you need to disambiguate from the monitor, which awkwardly mutters that you can’t read the help screen on the help screen, “the best way to read this help file is as a printed book, not on screen”, so instead you need to bring it up on the screen after which you can read the help, except when you get the right help screen, which isn’t the help screen page mentioned in the training notes but is a page that is mentioned in the training notes you type into the help screen, which is read straight off the help screen text.

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer to these issues is “Lockout is the first parser game released by the author, and as such may contain all kinds of quirks and odd bits.” Let’s instead then celebrate the author’s promise! Underthrumming Lockout is genuine interest in intertwining die Mensch-Maschine in procedure, the way in which our exertions to torque mechanisms exert us into the mechanizing logic, as ever more exacting you learn your response role are you extended through this ingineering resonates the beauty of the emerging capability you radioperate, which emerges as a playerfriendliness in the metalayer as the parser extends conditionalities to symphony the elegant consistencies you input output mediate, infusing the interaction not with mystic extravagance but a grounded realism of trial and error, confusion and learning, which, after some trial and error, we can hope our beloved parser catalyzes.

Why is it that you, weak of will, consider a sudoku a puzzle, it requires no concentrated response of alignment, you cell by cell sculpt til the form is freed, voila, are you satisfied? No, in my arrogance, wise of ways, I demanded more than Eye offered, always the path to exhaustion. Initially Eye asks you, or not even really asks you, nudges you to color by numbers: “The old man says, “Another very useful word is known as the Sphinx, which tours the pyramids. The Sphinx has the head of a lion, the body of a rat, and the tail of a wolf.” / “But that’s not a real word,” says one student. / "You are correct. Not all words are real words.”” The solution here is LAF: the first letter is the first letter of lion, the second letter is the middle letter of rat, the third letter is the last letter of wolf. An arbitrary set of instructions formulating its answer for you to fill in, for what? If the initial lateral form of reading pleases you, then it quickly saps your soul in sudokus like: ““I have learned how to get in,” says one servant. / “Tell me!” / The servant looks around cautiously. “One, twelve, and three.”” The answer being, counting up letters, alc, voila, are you satisfied?

Quite quickly you’re tapping your foot in anticipation of the revelation. The suffusion of Egyptian imagery suggests hieroglyphics, which can encode multiple syllables into phonogrammatic signs, but actually the travel codes follow a simple 5-4-1 pattern of location name to code, e.g. library → arl, which is a rule instantiated, as far as I can tell, entirely for the satisfaction of pyramid → map. The words of power you unlock are all equally as arbitrary: the signposted goal, attaining the rose, requires you to solve three minigames, each of which provides a letter, which jumble together meaninglessly: “oxd - that word’s body for a head / cab - head of a viper for a tail / bed - tail of a skink for a body”, XVK xyzzys you the END.

So you attain the rose, much to the envy of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, so we attain the revelation: you have collected x out of y points, go back and pzl! Here then is when the puzzling truly begins, transliterating the number of days in a year to letters, transliterating prime numbers into letters, mirroring the count of letters from one code to another, implying letters missing in phrases, counting up animals into ciphers, all dizzied through a map to make you long for the precisions of pyramids.

Perhaps you vibe with the puzzling, in which case, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. If you don’t, then there’s nothing else; here’s a room description spartan to its purpose: “This room is quite warm. Pots and utensils are scattered around the counters, and more hang from hooks. A fire is roaring underneath a wide stove.” What little details appear here are hints jammed in for your careering condensery. QED.

Suitable for a digital artifact, many layers of mediation await our excavation, but true historians, we leave all this clutter to the earth to claim the story which best fits the page. Why bother parsing who wrote what? Written by someone in the 80s based on tropes written endlessly since the 1880s to be written by someone else in the 80s to be translated by, depending upon which recension of the credits you credence, one person or another person or probably Google, what’s one to make of intent? Here, the best source is the bandits: you hunt down this murderous roving gang, so they politely tie you up next to your blanket and a fire and your horse, inviting you graciously to the puzzle, these “outlaws with no past and no future.”

Though rather than fog our way round warehouses, the salient quiddity to survive the muddling of intermediacies is an awe for Arizona’s austere beauty: we ride the vastness of deserts and grasslands, descend into crevasses and mines, and, most memorably, traipse along a rickety rope bridge over “the high rocky walls of the gorge” in which “a raging torrent rushes away”. The game’s insistence that we lead our horse to water, mount and dismount it, climb ropes, seek out summits, and blast our way through rock blazes a lively path through the scorching landscape.

This outdoorsy romping traverses the 80s terseness to reach us through the translation as a timeless appeal, a star to guide us through mostly perfunctory puzzling. Sometimes a hatchet lies a room over from a wooden door in need of hatcheting, other times there’s a blanket you should’ve picked up at the beginning or you’ll be going back to the beginning to get it. If the connection ever gets too complicated, the examine will helpfully explain, hey, this object is the solution to a puzzle, make sure to use this to solve this puzzle: “Some very high trees grow close to the edge of the chasm. Maybe cutting one down could help you to cross it.” When Tin Star does hazard up a more complex sequence, like a shootout with bandits or having to revive a dying man, the solution cuts straight through the complexity, go ahead and “>shoot”, what are you waiting for, hurry up and “>revive him”.

The premier exception to this is the centrepiece puzzle, requiring you to seek out a high point and make a smoke signal, which demands that you piece together everything you’ve picked up along the way and contemplate that way you’ve wandered in a satisfying grounding. Since the landscape is the strength, we ought to play to it.

Nothing I’ve said matters, of course, you’ve already agreed. At one time they recorded this game to magnetic tape as a series of square waves to be interpreted bit by bit into a ZX Spectrum. You had to encode magnetically an exact sequence of short, medium, or long vibrations to pulse binary into this inscrutable space obelisk engineered by Babelist hubris so it could summon unto you Sedona and its mesas. What a precious, innocent time that was, a world still yet unblemished by me.