A D R I F T

(So the annoying title is actually clever, because the added spaces indicate the letters are drifting apart from each other – get it, drifting? – but I’m not typing it that way).

The opening of Adrift is eerily reminiscent of that of the main festival’s Orbital Decay – sure, “astronaut must fight for survival after an EVA gone wrong” isn’t the world’s most recondite premise, but it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity (sidenote – it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity???) and I don’t remember playing any other bits of IF with this exact setup, so I’m very curious about what’s in the water that led to this coincidence.

At any rate, it’s a grabby way to open a game and it’s effective here too. Unlike Orbital Decay, Adrift is a parser game, so proceedings are unsurprisingly more puzzle-oriented. It’s also unfinished, consisting of just the first two challenges and ending after you manage to get back to your shuttle. This isn’t a completely polished slice of the game released separately as a teaser, mind – there are lots of indications that the game still needs some love and care, from a fair number of typos to the noticeable fall-off in scenery objects as the excerpt reaches its end. The puzzles also suffer from a bit of guess-the-verb-itis, with the second in particular requiring the player to type a vaguer approach to the solution because the more specific commands aren’t recognized (Spoiler - click to show)(I’d realized that I needed to swing the crate on my spacesuit’s tether, but all my attempts to TIE or ATTACH it failed; turns out you just need to SWING CRATE).

This is all fair enough for the Back Garden, though, and I was still able to enjoy the teaser for what it is, and would look forward to playing the completed game. For one thing, there’s more worldbuilding and personality on display here than the lost-in-space setup strictly requires, with integrated flashbacks lightly sketching an alternate history where the Soviet Union stuck around and showing our cosmonaut hero pining for his Lyudmilla, which mixes up the more-typical all-American space fantasy (albeit the war in Ukraine makes this less fun than it could be, sadly). There’s also some cool pixel-art headers that shift as you play, helping to set the mood, and I liked the physics-based nature of the puzzles, which made them satisfying to solve. As a result, it’s not too hard to squint and see what the more robust finished product would look like after completing the design and some rigorous testing, so I hope this review sends a strong signal to the author to get working!

I don't have much experience with parser games, but this one felt right to me in many ways. It's not a complete game, but it does a lot of things well.

The game starts out with you playing the role of a cosmonaut, adrift in space. Oxygen is running low and the situation is pretty dire. Somehow, someway, you must figure out how to save yourself.

What I liked about the game is that by having practically no environment to really explore, you are forced to envision yourself being in that scenario in order to progress. What can you possibly observe or do while floating in space, trapped in your space suit? By getting in that headspace, the answers start to become clear.

The only things holding this game back from a higher rating are the few unfinished parts (I wanted more things to do) and a lack of adequate synonyms for commands. There was one puzzle that had me stumped for a bit (and trying other, less obvious actions all the while) because I didn't type the command as the author had envisioned. I eventually figured it out though and survived the crisis.

At the end of the day, I really enjoyed this game. I felt like I was the one who was trapped in a space suit, with limited oxygen, floating in the void of space. Some games make me feel as if I'm controlling someone else, but I felt really engaged while playing this one.

I also like games that do more with less. I hope to play more games from this author.

Pro Tip: I made the game go fullscreen, but there were still white bars on either side. So I opened the browser's inspector and edited the CSS to make the background black outside the game area… and only then did I feel like I was floating in space. I totally IMAXed this game. ;-)

This is a short parser game set in space. It has neat little pixelart graphics at the top.

Like another reviewer, I had a bit of trouble realizing I had to hit enter to start the game (might be worth adding a 'hit enter to continue' text on the title screen).

The game has you floating in space. There's not much to do besides cry, it seems at first, but fortunately the game has implemented a lot of little actions to add character. But then the real puzzles start (for me, I started by (Spoiler - click to show)examining my suit, if anyone's stuck).

Besides being longer, the best thing the game could do is get more transcripts from players and responding to even more actions than are in the game (for instance, I think TURN ME should give a different response).

It also might be worth splitting up some of the complex actions into more parts; I typed in one command and the game had a big, complex scenario where I tried things over and over again until I figured it out. It might have been more fun to do that myself instead of having it described to me.