Superluminal Vagrant Twin

The description of Superluminal Vagrant Twin announces itself as a "shallow but broad" exploration game, and I heartily disagree. Sometimes, less is more, and that is no more apparent than in the text of this brilliant piece of interactive fiction.

You're a space captain on a mission to make enough money to get back what you've lost, and you've got to visit a score or two of weird and wonderful planets to do it. Each world is given a brief description, every character on their surface sketched out in a sentence.

But it's that brevity that lights a fire in the hearth of imagination, each detail latched on to, recorded and remembered and treasured because it's those little details that offer clues on how to proceed and how to get to the next destination.
As each location is reached, more of the setting is revealed - not so much that it feels like exposition, but enough to give you an idea about who inhabits this place, what goes on in it, and what you can do here.

Eventually, your goal will be in reach, but you'll soon discover that maybe there's more to do out there than you realized.

A remarkable piece of writing that deserves more eyes on it, like a lot of IF works out there. Five amalg dreadnoughts out of five.

As a preface, I have a terrible habit of getting really frustrated with parser games, taking a break, then forgetting to come back. But this game? Absolutely addictive.

As other reviews have mentioned, it's stripped down and very easy to navigate, which gives the little details in the writing room to shine. The gameplay is simple and hypnotic, which worked for me since I was primarily interested in the little characters we meet as we make our way through the galaxy.

It's fun, the writing is charming, and it brought me back to the sense of exploration and wonder that only good sci-fi and screenshots of the early Internet can invoke in me.

Easily one of the most engaging beginnings to an IF piece. It gets you right onto the journey of planetary exploration/hopping from the get-go and dispenses with some of the typical parser commands, to keep things moving and feeling streamlined. I.e., 'Look' is still a very important action, but it is done away with for quite a few elements within the game. The descriptions are brief but poetic and often haunting - the planets (or remnants of them) are captivating to visit and some are quite tricky to find, but you have plenty of clues and help, and there's more than one way to get somewhere. There's a sense of danger and humor throughout. I wound up completing all possible quests (which you probably don't have to, but it was doable and led to a more satisfying finish for me.) Some of these quests involved bounty hunting and I questioned the morality of a few of them, whereas others were more clear-cut in being 'bad guys'. I got stuck on one puzzle and then felt a little silly when I realized I was overlooking a very....obvious....familiar....set of clues I could follow. I'll avoid spoilers.

Overall, I definitely recommend!