Operative Nine

I tend to like the sparse humor in DiBianca games. It's particularly evident in Operative Nine where you, with your trusty PQ-807 microcomputer, LINK to various things in an attempt to infiltrate and upset the Agency, who are a step ahead of CAMFOR. It's unclear who the good guys or bad guys are. This provides, for me, part of the amusement. You are just doing stuff. There's no great evil to repel or instigate. You just have a list of tasks: put lethargex in the ventilator system, or replace the dossier on Person 372 with a fake one. None of this is done via inventory management.

Instead, the hacking has small mini-games where you, as a pair of @'s, run around. If you’re lost, step on the ??'s. Many of the early ones have Sokoban-style logic. There are boxes, 2-wide, to push onto pairs of brackets. Later, there’s a copycat logic puzzle. You have one puzzle where you move, say, four things around with arrows, though if one hits a wall, it doesn’t move. The brackets are in an odd formation, so you have to figure out where to put things. There’s a conveyor belt (the text graphics are particularly nice here) and even a timed puzzle where you have to cut a fuse. That was probably my favorite one once I solved it, because the seemingly most intuitive and direct way wastes a precious turn or two, and the bomb goes off. I solved it with zero turns left. Fortunately, in all the games, you can reset with an R at any time, even if you’re only trapped in a no-win situation e.g. a dead end in a two-level maze. In puzzles with multiple levels, you don't go back to level one if you fail. I enjoyed bashing into walls in an "avoid traps in the darkness" puzzle. The various different text scenarios are rather jolly especially for how abstract they are. Some are even a bit whimsical with the author showing off things he can program, like a quasi-hide-and-seek crowd-pleaser where you mow someone's lawn and search through a hedge.

There's the usual learning curve, including a tutorial (LINK MODULE in your inventory) that's kind of hard to bungle but quite fun for all that. The other inventory items are similarly useless to you except as accessories that help complete your objective once you solved the abstract puzzle. Then they vanish. I made the (sort of) mistake of just opening all the doors I could going north, so I wound up going doing some of the harder puzzles first and missing easier ones. So, with several things to do on my list, I was wondering just how hard it would get! I felt silly when I backtracked, even as I solved things pretty quickly. The last thing I did actually involved using the EXAMINE command on something that wasn’t really hidden. I’d been pointed to the right room. There was just a "X of Y" and I kept examining the Y not the X. Maybe the tougher puzzles fried my brain.

The humor is quick and effective. Since you’re a spy, you don't have time for long chats once something works, and your boss, who speaks through your earpiece, doesn't either. Often the stuff that’s left out is what’s really interesting, as the dialogue makes you say "Wait, what about ..." and there are several different possible amusing reasons why We Don’t Talk About Such Things In This Business.

I have theories why this didn't place as highly as usual. I think perhaps the puzzles were puzzlier than usual, which worked great for me, but not so great or others. I really like ones where you can step back and eliminate possibilities before diving in if you're careful, and I'd like to see more of them. But of course they're frustrating if you don't have that initial insight. Another problem might be, some were really long, and while you could reset, you couldn't save in-game as Inform didn't offer saves between parser moves. I made a few finger slips myself when I knew what I wanted to do, and I had to start all over. This was okay back in the 80s, and it's okay with an emulator where you can save states, but I did get a bit frustrated when I was almost all the way done, and I imagine it's tougher for people who feel less comfortable in such situations.

Such state saving is not trivial especially for the puzzles with moving pieces, and it'd require some grindy testing, but it seems worthwhile for a post-comp release. Perhaps another reason was, it just wasn't most people's sort of shuffling things around. I was able to sit back and appreciate some of the logic or logic jumps pretty quickly. I am a more experienced Sokoban player than can really be healthy, so the wrinkles added to successive puzzles felt quite fun. I enjoyed the conveyor belt puzzle as well. The trickiest one was the copycat puzzle where you started with one percent-sign to move into place, then two, then three, then four. Organizing them spatially was tough, but the key was to hit one against a wall (inner or outer) to straighten them all out. Another puzzle had four pins to move up and down, where pushing one moves another up and down, and I avoided moving them against the edge until I did some arithmetic to prove that you needed to push a pin against the upper or lower wall.

Operative Nine is simple to understand and to get going, and the variety of mini-games kept me happy. However, I can see how someone might get really stuck on one, if this isn't their thing. I think also there could be a few hints as to how and why solutions work, beyond your boss saying "keep at it," especially for the final puzzle in a set of four. Perhaps you could trigger an option to tell you you're on the right track, or if you made things unwinnable. This feels like user-friendliness, though.