Spider and Web

Spider and Web is the first IF game I've played in many years, and the first that I actually completed! Don't think that an indication of the lack of difficulty in this game, rather it is due to my renewed interest in the genre.

I thought the narrative framing of the story was very creative and served as a clever way of breaking the story up into smaller segments and treating each as individual challenges. I did find the actual gameplay a little frustrating, between the (Spoiler - click to show)obnoxious modular inventory items and having to (Spoiler - click to show)examine everything to find the right keywords to reveal additional things in the room since they weren't included in the room's description itself. This latter trait was very effectively used in a couple places but was still generally annoying.

There were a few places where information about how things worked was withheld until a future segment which sort of worked okay from a narrative perspective but made it difficult to tell if such challenges were supposed to be solved in the moment or left for later.

While in retrospect I think THE puzzle is extremely smart and narratively well executed, I bounced right off of it on my playthrough. When I first made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the interrogation room outside a flashback, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to (Spoiler - click to show)attach the bomb to the chair, intuiting that I would need to (Spoiler - click to show)use the voice module to activate it when I returned to the interrogation. I was completely unable to make that work of course, so eventually gave up and went on my way.

I was very confused then when (Spoiler - click to show)I did return to the interrogation, to then (Spoiler - click to show)activate the voice module and see that not only did it work, but (Spoiler - click to show)it triggered a completely different device than the one I had attached the voice module to. While I worked through the remainder of the game, I assumed this was actually just a bug in the game that happened to play in my favor, or that the author had not figured out a good way to reconcile (Spoiler - click to show)the interrogations with the flashbacks and so left it a little awkward. (Spoiler - click to show)Items being scattered about places that I hadn't been seemed to confirm this, and I just ignored it and moved on.

While I had grasped (Spoiler - click to show)the time dynamic of the interrogations and that you were (Spoiler - click to show)playing through flashbacks, I completely missed that (Spoiler - click to show)when you're not being interrogated you're not just playing a flashback, but you're playing the lie that you're telling to your investigator and as such (Spoiler - click to show)are an unreliable narrator! That is super smart storytelling, but not at all obvious as a player. I didn't discover that (Spoiler - click to show)the shuffling around of objects was intentional until I had to look up a walkthrough to help me through the segment where the lights go out, since I had no reason to believe I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)go all the way back to the drop ceiling near the beginning of the game. The walkthrough then explained THE puzzle. While it made sense, I also kind of felt sour about it since it felt like (Spoiler - click to show)the game lied to me and there was no way for me to have known. That's not entirely true, but it required a much deeper level of attention and (Spoiler - click to show)meta-analysis than I was expecting to have to give the game.

Overall, I thought this was a good story and a good game, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a veteran IF player. IF games require a mental model of what you can do and how things work, of how to interact with the world, and this game toys with those concepts. Excellent premise, but the player needs to thoroughly understand those things and be able to conceive of bending those rules to really grasp this work in its entirety.