Ratings and Reviews by Marco Innocenti

ABCaA is an incredibly polished game, with complex mechanics that perfectly work and some good writing. Its major "flaw" is that it requires too much knowledge from outside of the game. The 4 stars are an average between these two contexts: 1) you are not into mathematics and want a game whose puzzles can be solved "from the inside": 3/5 because the game is very, very strong in many aspects but you shall eventually never finish it; 2) you like maths and are good at them: 5/5, because the game is a romp which is frankly perfect.

I liked the setting and the tone of this game a lot. It's nice how the main character is build throughout the story and how you can still discover something about her in the very final scene. Unfortunately, the version I've been playing (original IFComp, first-day release) suffers from a series of drawbacks that spoiled some of the fun.

First of all, the mechanics. Having every single sequence as a puzzle which you have to solve to advance reminded me too much of those old-time games in the style of Robin of Sherwood by Brian Howarth. A little more space to maneuver wouldn't have harmed.

Second: large part of the game is solved by mechanically TALKing TO someone pretty obvious. The parser is reduced enough so that a handful of verbs are needed in total. Maybe, given how the story is nice and appealing, a choice-based text would have been more suited for the occasion. (ETA: this may sound arbitrary and a little bit too far, and it probably is: it was indeed more of a provocation than a real suggestion. We know how branching is/should be one of the main points in choice-based mechanics, and this was obviously not the intent of the author.)

Last: there's a lot of polish to undergo to make this title perfect. Objects that don't disappear in descriptions, others that stick in your inventory after jumps of years; typos (to whom I don't care much, but still there they are...); the lack of interaction with some of the descriptions and a couple of sudden deaths that can be solved only after one died, via UNDO.

This said: there's 6 different endings (which I wasn't able to find), and a lot of story to read and live. If this was given some more time to test it would have been 4 stars at least.

(ETA: I ended up giving 4 stars to this game anyway, as i understood, in comparison with other projects, that I was being too critical. The story is really cool and the games embraces you a lot, in a trip that I would do again, now that some weeks have passed.)

I actually woke up this morning, after playing WotD all night yesterday, finally grasping what was going on.

This is a well structured, almost puzzle-less sci-fi, with a brilliant PC and an incredibly detailed backstory, which could have aimed, imho, at a much higher outcome.

The most intriguing things revolve around racial (and racist) themes, told through the eyes of a special creature whose sole businesses in the universe seem to be procreation and money. And money because of procreation.
There are aspects of the subplot which are genius: the mating techniques of different races; how an Outworder sees us (provided the Inner Worlders are us); how racism can dwell in close environments; segregation.

Unfortunately, the story is presented through an endless array of posts and notes, and via the comments (on dead bodies) by a cold PC, who’s prime feature seems to be the lack of any empathy with anyone except her distant relatives and lovers. All of this sums up to a distinct vibe and a cool backstory that, in the end, fails in finding a route to the final outcome.
The atmosphere is strong (I was actually scared by the continuous opening and closing of doors, hinting at another survivor— the ship is full of dead bodies after an initial “incident”) although there is not much to do except reading tons of backstory. And this is first flaw of an otherwise impressive game.

Style apart (the text needs some more intense editing, due to the generative process it has to sustain), the fact that the main action you continuously do is reading notes or long flashbacks hinders the gameplay a bit. This sums up to the fact that navigation is hard due to a very symmetrical and squareish map (a map is provided and I would say it is fundamental for your survival).

But the main aspect — the thing that, eventually, lowered my experience most — is that, of all the important backstory told, the one which is central to the final twist (and there IS a final twist!) is overlooked enough that I simply forgot to notice. Saying more means spoiler, so I have nothing to add, if not that a much more “central” approach to something inside the ship would have done a better job in causing the final wow-effect.

Finally, the endgame, too, looks muddled and I failed to actually get what was happening in the ship until I woke up this morning with the proverbial epiphany.

To recap: I wish the main story was more “main” and the sub-plots (about race, gender, and the overall backstory) ended up being sub-plots and not the big finger in front of the moon. I wish I could understand more about the plot, something my “4-Good” ending didn’t convey (who was the one opening and closing the doors? I understood this after an 8-hours sleep, never having seen him during play!). I wish I could read less and do more, as a piece of Interactive Fiction should allow.

This said, I enjoyed this game a lot, and it frankly had me holding tight to the chair here and there, for some nice, perpetual sense of danger. A calm post-comp reset of the game is all it’s needed to put these few things straight.