A1RL0CK

Played: 7/20/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, all 3 endings, 170/185

This is a wake-with-amnesia-in-sci-fi-base jam. It is pretty up front about its narrative aims, to dribble story at you while exploring and puzzle solving until the full narrative is clear. Its also pretty darn good at it. The challenge in these kinds of narratives is to make the background lore/flashbacks organic to the work and not a jarringly disconnected series of infodumps and background reading. There is enough variety in mechanism (loud speaker dialogue! found documents! mental impressions!) that things bubble along pleasantly if not COMPLETELY organically. That engineering should not be underestimated in a work where the author has limited control over player sequencing. There is a bit of monologuing right at the end that maybe crosses the infodump line, but has the benefit of kind of being de riguer for this kind of narrative.

The story itself is interesting and surprising enough that while not COMPLETELY revolutionary is still unguessably unique and packed with rewarding details and callbacks. The story architecture is its strongest feature, and definitely worth the price of admission.

There are implementation issues with gameplay - at points you are informed you must drop an object you are no longer holding, many unimplemented nouns, some document disambiguation issues. Most are forgivable, though sometimes these artifacts were actively intrusive. One message pushed me to a walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)If you try to >GET or >PUSH a grate, you are told ‘That’s fixed in place.’ Yet it must be >OPEN’d which thanks to messaging I never tried. Another >VERB NOUN fail message seemed so conclusively ‘NO’ that I was discouraged from trying >VERB NOUN WITH OTHER-NOUN. Yet another puzzle was so insufficiently clued that the moon logic solution was out of grasp for me.

Armed with a walkthrough I did power past most of that, though am not sure I would have persisted without. That always casts a pall over things. The other notable aspect of the work is its prose. I am famously fussy about language, and while this is nowhere near the most indulgent I have encountered, its excesses were a bit beyond my comfort zone. This is of course a personal choice, and your experience may vary, depending on your patience for phrases like “The whales listen with interest to the arabesques of your mind.”

In the end, neither of those artifacts sank the work. Its confident, drip-fed central narrative is its strength and ultimately pulls you through to its worthy ending. With help of walkthrough.