Superluminal Vagrant Twin

Superluminal Vagrant Twin stands out for its unusual format for IF and for its understated, evocative writing that makes the world feel complex and immersive without facing the player with a wall of text. Its mechanics feel quite different from standard IF and work well with the feel. I feel it's main weakness is the lack of a satisfying climax: you gradually figure out more about the world and how to use the mechanics effectively, and then you do that and win without surprises or twists. While there are multiple options, it didn't feel like it mattered which one you picked, and I kept waiting for moral choices or other elaborations on the formula. That said, it was well worth playing and a lot of fun.

This is one of Pacian's best games, which is saying a lot. It is intricate but casual, and lasts 1-2 hours for the main storyline.

You play as a ship captain whose twin brother has been taken and frozen due to your unpaid loans. You must travel to a variety of worlds and systems to get enough cash to free your brother.

The world model is purposely simple. Each world and its orbit constitute a single location. Each location has 1-5 npcs and 0-2 other nouns. The only interaction available with most NPCs is TALK TO, although some can BUY and SELL, and a few other interactions pop up later.

You can't examine anything, and there's no searching or any such thing. You just travel from world to world, building up money until you're done. There's no climactic finale, but it's still rewarding.

This game is one of the best science fiction games I have played.

First impressions are of a text-based Elite, but it's only a superficial resemblance. Sure, you're travelling from planet to planet buying and selling, but there is no economy to speak of, only fetch quests - which is perfectly fitting, given the text adventure format, fetch quests being the atomic unit of adventure game puzzles.

Money is used as a gating mechanism, your limited resources only granting access to a few planets and low-paid activities at first, you will need to use your ingenuity and wits to gain the big bucks - opening up more and more untold vistas for your delectation.

The writing is ultra-sparse but extremely evocative. A whole galaxy of strangeness. There is humour, creepiness, sadness, awe, sometimes all at once. It touches on themes of humanism and racism whilst delivering a rollicking science-fantasy adventure. Brilliant stuff. I recommend the hell out of this game.

Currently the biggest, most complex and most polished game by the author, Superluminal Vagrant Twin is a space trading simulator - an old and noble genre including such classics as Elite, but tragically underrepresented in IF until now. There's a huge universe waiting for you to explore with lots of different planets to visit, people to meet, goods to buy and sell, side quests to complete.

You can rush through the main plot fairly quickly, but there are many other things to discover (even after getting all the achievements) - which I naturally won't spoil here. And, of course, rushing through this game would be completely missing the point, because the best part of it is not making the money but savoring the wonderful descriptions - terse and colorful, poetic without being pretentious; closing your eyes and trying to visualize all the various worlds you travel to (Spoiler - click to show) (there were 53 of them in the beta version I played).

My favorite character was the deep space explorer on Splinter. I instantly imagined Ursula K. Le Guin.