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About the StoryIn a race against time, can you escape before it's too late? It's the same old story, really... A low-ranking officer stuck on a doomed spaceship hurtling headlong toward the inescapable gravitational pull of a quantum singularity. Only a perfect storm of systems failures stands between you and your race to find a serviceable life pod. Good luck, Science Officer Cadet Third Class! You're going to need it. Game Details |
49th Place - tie - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 2 Write a review |
This is a simple puzzler in the classic fashion. You are a crew member of a space ship. While you are sitting on the toilet an emergency strikes (doesn't that always happen!). You have to figure out a way to abandon ship, but there are a lot of things broken that you might have to fix first.
That's pretty much it, a simple, straight-forward puzzler. You are playing against the clock, so it might require multiple playthroughs to beat the game, learning from the failed playthroughs (much like how I found Zork to be). In the end (Spoiler - click to show)the solution is pretty simple, you just have to know the correct order of operations.
Honestly, the game/puzzle part of this is nothing to write home about, but what I appreciated was everything else that the game was wrapped in. The humor and pop culture refences in the game made me laugh out loud several times. The game's code was very robust and allowed you to do a number of things that didn't matter to solving the main puzzle (sidequests and easter eggs if you will). I also appreciated the author's attempt at making feelies to go with the game (which can be accessed on the game's website) as well as the very polished hints and walkthrough document.
I hope to see more from this author in the future.
This was another game of interest, as one of the last things I’m programming in my game is a similar scenario to this: trying to flee a ship that is being destroyed and trying to make it to an escape pod. It was interesting to look at this and try to see what worked for me and what didn’t.
This is a timed game, with approximately 100 turns. I found that time ran out pretty quickly for me; I had explored about half of the ship when I first found out the game had ended.
That time is marked by frequent messages from the ship’s computer. The messages start normal but become more and more unusual. I found that for my tastes it was a bit too frequent and intense; I felt like I barely had time to do anything before it was pushing me to go and run and do.
The layout is large enough and the puzzles complex enough that it felt weighty and had that feel of ‘don’t know if I can do this’ before the puzzles were solved and ‘ahh so that’s how it is’ after. There was clear competency in coding; I didn’t encounter problems where puzzles malfunctioned or interactions were misleading. However, there was somewhat of a deficit in polish; many objects are undescribed, and the game could have had more scenery items implemented. A particularly rough example was the holographic doctor, who had no description and didn’t reply to TALK TO or ASK DOCTOR ABOUT DOCTOR or stuff like that.
But the manual was really cool, as was the multiple paths, and it gave me some ideas. The overall craftmanship was high, I think I had different expectations from the author. So I definitely think if the author did another game, I’d expect it to be really good.