A1RL0CK

(I suggest you don't reveal the next two spoilers unless you've finished the game. Really don't want to spoil anything.) This game feels like the love-child of (Spoiler - click to show)Babel and (Spoiler - click to show)Coloratura. Two games which had a profound emotional impact on me.

This game also impacted me.

I remember when Marco Innocenti entered the scene with Andromeda Awakening. And I was like, yeah, it's ok, but I didn't really see what everyone else was raving about. It simply didn't click.

That was in 2011. In the last three days, I have played two other Marco Innocenti games ("A Train to Picadilly" being the the other one). Well, either I was very short-sighted back then and everyone else could see what he was going to become, or he grew immensely as an author.

I suspect both.

In this relatively short Punyinform game, which apprently does not constrain him but instead streamlines the gameplaying experience by focusing the action on just as much interaction as necessary (and yet the game feels delightfully responsive all the while), Marco Innocenti treats us to the three best things he brings to IF. He brings exquisite writing, with unexpected turns of phrase that border on the poetic, surprising by the matter-of-fact way they are stated. He bring a fertile imagination. And he brings remarkably solid puzzle design.

And we're talking what I usually call the good stuff in puzzles. The puzzles where you visualize the rooms and the objects, and try to resolve situations as though you were actually there. The puzzles where you experiment (not that experimentation is deeply detailed, but there is just enough - particularly, it skillfully draws your attention away from where you should not focus. That is so hard. I so deeply admire this), maybe with no particular obvious guidance but with a definitive notion, which grows stronger as you play, that this is where you need to direct your efforts.

The writing (at points you can sort of tell English is not his first language, but rather than that resulting in awkwardness and bad communication, it instead appears to enhance the atmosphere. Not many people can get away with that!) and the fertile imagination - and, in the case of this game, the absolutely masterful way in which, over the first handful of moves, you discover a few things about the PC, things that could have been stated immediately but which instead he finds a way to let us stumble upon by ourselves - are the tremendous glue that keep this together in the first half of the game, which is where the puzzles are. In the second half, it becomes a lot more about the story, the mood, the atmosphere. I found this to be an excellent choice. When you're envolved in a story like this, drawn in, sure, you can tackle harder puzzles for a while, but eventually you go "I want to see where this story is going!". Story-heavy games which get harder as the game progress can be very frustrating because of this. But the decision to ease up on the puzzles for the endgame section, and instead dole out story chunks in measured segments (so well measured; the final sections really are just story-dump, but they are told in such different perspectives, using such different techniques, triggered by different things, that it nevel feels like a dump) takes courage.

I had no particular trouble with the puzzles. I loved the manner in which they made me think.

Near the beginning, there's a point where you hear a voice tell you that you need to get to the location physically above you. I was so drawn into the game that I looked up. Me. The player, holding the tablet in my hands, playing the game through Fabularium's internal keyboard. I actually looked up, away from the screen, towards the ceiling of my room, and thought to myself "ok, it's up there, but I don't think I can get there directly from where I am."

Then I realised what I had just done.

...just plain awesome.

Similarly, don't want to spoil anything, but... how can I say this... after a certain revelation, I tried to do something, and I tried for 4 or 5 moves, rewording it. Not because the game prompted me, but because it felt right. Or rather, something felt wrong and I wanted to fix it. The game didn't let me, or the PC was not able to, so I just kept going, but it's so interesting that I felt so uncomfortable that, like an itch I had to scratch, for a few moves after (Spoiler - click to show)seeing what's in the quarantine room, and the other corpse with the same suit, I rather desperately wanted to (Spoiler - click to show)remove my own suit.

YMMV, different strokes for different folks, I don't guarantee that you'll love it as much as I did or that you'll have as great an experience. But I did. And I think it's the type of experience that I will treasure, just like I treasure the experience from those two games in spoiler tags there at the top.

I'm going to wait for a suitable amount of time, and then, next stop: A1RL0CK 2. I'm savouring the antecipation.

PS - Unrelated to IF. The protagonist here shares a name with a character in an anime I particularly enjoy, "Noir". This game has nothing to do with that anime. And yet, and yet, on a certain level, I sort of can see a similarity between both of them - the protagonist here and her namesake in Noir. It's probably just me. But... you know... this stuff lingers.