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The HMS Outsider, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
IFCOMP23 had a weirdly prominent nautical subcurrent. In recognition, this is the inauguration of the review sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” We'll kick off the sub-series with a shipboard murder mystery. The setup is this - two down on their luck brothers find work aboard a foreign cargo vessel, only to be accused of the murder of the only person that speaks their language! Now one brother must solve the mystery before they arrive in port and are committed to foreign justice. Also, it is an airship. Still counts!
It is a confidently compact setup, both in the tight map and the crisp text renderings of the environs. Maybe a little too crisp? The first puzzle, getting tools to escape your quarters, is straight forward enough. But the timing is a little wonky. There is a reveal about the nature of your boat that feels surprising, except it is so underplayed that it initially reads as buggy text. It is not actually clear if the author intends it as a reveal, or they believe you already knew.
Great swaths of the game are like that. My initial impression was that the world building was half-baked. But the more I played, the more I realized the world building was actually pretty robust, it was just communicated through oddly underplayed or weirdly timed details. It made it hard to get a bead on what was happening, and made the puzzles harder than their construct.
During another early sequence, you are navigating a space with two parallel hallways fore/aft. To do so requires counter-intuitive ‘port/starboard’ directions to get into the right passage, then ‘fore’ to continue. Particularly when avoiding speedy NPCs, its just enough to trip up. At other points, when handling containers, the text refers to them by contents you haven’t seen yet. You don’t meet the crew exactly, they breeze past you with vanishingly small expository text. There is machinery maddeningly, opaquely described. It all added up to a first hour and three quarter where I made slow, steady progress, but often wasn’t clear why things were working or failing, and only a hand drawn map keeping the geography clear. If asked to stop and rate at an hour and a half, I likely would have rated it a mechanical exercise of clever puzzles and inadequate (and occasionally misleading) text.
But something happened with 15 min to go - the cumulative weight of the drip-fed world building, the opaque NPC movements, the clues that had been slowly accreting, even the arbitrary-seeming game mechanics suddenly crystallized. I hit some sort of informational critical mass and the machine of the game revealed itself to me, and it was pretty cool! On the heels of that revelation came a second: the author had super effectively put me in the shoes of a man stranded in a society not his own, outside looking in. It was kind of opaque to me because it was kind of opaque to him too! Slow clap, author, slow clap.
Unfortunately, these revelations were not in time to finish the game, at two hours it remains unfinished. I had spent too much time adrift to call it engaging, but under the wire the game sparked white hot.
I would fix those premature contents messages though.
Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Buzzer beating Sparks of Joy, recasting Notably Buggy descriptions into Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Most likely yes, now that I finally feel the click.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless