Silicon and Cells

I've known Unity was powerful for a while, yet maybe it was too powerful for a regular-style text adventure. There've been Unity games in IFComp before, the first (I think) being Milk Party Palace back in 2014. It was relatively harmless, featuring Montell Jordan's "This is How We Do It" as part of the soundtrack, as well as random demands from Alec Baldwin. So it was just a case of people showing off their new and shiny unity skills. That's all well and good, but with Unity being more mature and less new and shiny, we'd hope for something deeper, and I think Silicon and Cells gives that to the reader.

IFComp 2021 had no shortage of simulation games, or games where you went into cyberspace. While they ran together for me, largely because I procrastinated a lot to their end, each was clearly its own game. I think Silicon and Cells stood out the most for me. That's partially due to a good story, but I have to admit I remembered the technical features most. One of the first things SnC provides is immediate customization of font size. This may not seem like a big deal, until you realize you can use the mouse wheel to scroll through the main text window, and you don't have to click "next" nearly as much, and you don't have to worry if you read something carefully enough before clicking "next." This was a big relief to me. The game said 1 1/2 hours, but it valued my time and saved my energy, so I was able to focus on the story. You can, of course, control-scroll wheel with twine, but Unity calculates the text wrapping so you can see as much or little as you want.

The other thing about the text is this: the game is divided into Meatspace, with light blue text, and Cyberspace, with pink text, both on a background. This echoes the "dark mode" that works so well on browsers, and so I'm grateful for it. While Meatspace simply has a standard text interface, Cybertext is is a neat curved 3-d surface plot with all sorts of cute places (castle, your own home replete with whiteboard) and reenforces that it's, well, not real. You know where you are without having to look up a specific location And your dialogue/where-to-go choices are in a thin rectangle on the right. This makes it so reading is never exhausting, and these are the sort of design choices that you take for granted once they work well, but people miss them a lot if they're gone. And it's needed, once playtime gets over an hour. I experienced very few "are we there yet" moments as I went through, despite having no walkthrough.

You don't really need one to get through, either. Because the progression is straightforward, though the puzzles aren't trivial. You, as Jaya, have failed at a heist, but you've apparently done well enough for your quasi-mentor Elihu to encourage you to things bigger than a giant heist. Elihu's plans are deep, and you wind up having to see and talk to a lot of shady people who themselves are fighting against even shadier people. On the way, you get bionic upgrades. You can't use them all at once. In fact, at first, you can only possess one at a time. These form the basis for most of the puzzles. I went with social engineering, which occasionally gives an extra dialogue choice that pops up as soon as you switch it on. Unsurprisingly, these move the game and narrative forward in ways regular chat can't. I also got enhanced vision, which let me see fingerprints on a keypad. Later on, you get super strength or the ability to slow down time, and you get multiple charge units, so you can, for instance, really slow time down or get super strong. Many of the later puzzles require you to switch to the right power-ups in time, or you die. Sort of. The game just kicks you back a bit, and you have to try again. Since there was no save feature, I appreciated this.

As for the details of the plot? It's fun to figure how to cheat at the casino or visit people in cyberspace. The small MUD is full of humor and purpose and an appropriate villain (not that anyone's TERRIBLY nice here) and, of course, a puzzle to get around a troll with way more HP and damage per turn than you. There seems to be more than one way. There's also some character called The Oracle who used to be human and is sort of one of the Elders (like Elihu) who used to be in charge of things, before the G.O.D. framework and its cherubim (who are not very innocent enforcers) took over. You can only ask the Oracle factual questions, so often you need to find the right way to ask. Or you need to ask other NPCs the right way to ask.

So there's a lot of back-and-forthing among the various locations that include NebulaCorp, which is pretty dysfunctional and dystopian, and your own haunts. SnC is good about rejecting you if you don't need to do any more. Some NPCs are a bit snarky but never mean in suggesting where to go next, and your private home in Cyberspace with its whiteboard lets you connect the dots at your leisure. You do, indeed, have a choice of which Elder to betray or annoy. I wanted to betray one of them, but I couldn't figure the timed puzzle, so I went with the other. Hooray, expedience! Sadly I couldn't save and see the other ending quickly. That combined with no documentation cluing all the walkthroughs (surely for getting through the game we deserve a big-picture view of all the ways through?) was probably my biggest disappointment. I saw a well-conceived world but felt locked out from really exploring it, because a simple feature, one much simpler than SnC's useful conveniences, was absent. I noticed Mike Spivey's review mentioned he had an easier second time through, and experience bears this out. The interface is more comfortable, and you have an idea that the world is bounded.

Still, the story engaged me, and I missed that there was satire bit at first, but then again, I missed the satire in Fight Club and was just kind of disgusted (mitigating factor: many people praised it for what they thought it was.) Then again, I also missed the satire in RoboCop the first time through. Then I learned it was there, and I enjoyed Robocop a totally different way. Same, too, with the first bits of SnC. It's pretty clear the scene where you get bionic arms installed is meant to be, and I'm sure I've missed others. It's equally exciting played straight-up or acknowledging sly fourth-wall winks, and even before placing near the top quarter, it showed text-based adventures in Unity are worthwhile and doable, and you don't have to be super-dazzling. The authors showed considerable skill in making SnC accessible, enjoyable and even revisitable to someone who thought he was sick of internet/virtual reality simulators.