The Plant

The Plant is a classic puzzlefest, of a substantial length few modern games try to match. The PC is a nameless corporate drone who, along with their boss Mr. Teeterwaller, is on their way to an offsite meeting when their car breaks down. This leaves them in the right place at the right time to witness an apparent heist of a bunch of trucks with mysterious, radioactive contents, and the conspiracy-minded, UFO-hunting Mr. Teeterwaller is determined to investigate the plant where they've been taken.

The puzzles are well-implemented, if not always especially diegetically sensible. (It's very convenient that (Spoiler - click to show)the garage door opener that was in the glove compartment of a secondhand car happens to go to the garage of someone who lives near where your car broke down, and especially convenient that the owner of the garage happens to have a catalogue of barcodes for commercial products that somehow also provides you the information you need to open the plant's gate.) I rarely struggled with the parser, and while some of the solutions were a little off-the-wall, it was mostly in a charming way and not "how the heck was I supposed to guess THAT?" My favorite puzzle was the language puzzle early on, and I wish there had been more occasions later that required the use of Blottnian verbs. (Although this is also the only place where I ran into issues with the syntax: I tried (Spoiler - click to show)SAY [VERB] TO DOG and DOG, [VERB] before realizing that what it wanted was just the bare verb.)

But I did feel that once I got into the plant, I was mostly just solving puzzles because the puzzles were there without a strong idea of what my goal was, which turns out to be because Mr. Teeterwaller has a goal in mind but doesn't really tell you what it is until you reach it. Which is symptomatic of the biggest problem I had with the game: it essentially divided main-character status between the PC and Mr. Teeterwaller in ways that did not make much sense to me.

Mr. Teeterwaller is the one who is interested in breaking into the plant; he's the one who has a goal, he's the one who is eventually revealed to have a backstory that ties into the larger plot. But mechanically, he doesn't do anything; you can interact with him a little, but it's never necessary. He just follows you around and occasionally apes your actions (you put on a hard hat, he puts on a hard hat), and when he's not doing that, the game cycles between a small handful of default messages that are entertaining at first but quickly turn into white noise. There's also no real reason given for why he needs you to do everything, not even a strong characterization element of, say, him being the kind of guy who won't do anything himself when he could delegate. Meanwhile, the PC seems to have no particular interest in the situation and on a story level is just being dragged around by Mr. Teeterwaller, but of course by virtue of being the PC, they are the one who takes every single meaningful action in the game--up to and including making the big final choice that determines what ending you get, even though they're not the one who's invested in the outcome.

So we end up with this situation where narratively, Mr. Teeterwaller is the sole driver of the plot, but mechanically, the PC is occupying that role despite the fact that there isn't really a reason for them to do that. While playing, I wondered sometimes why Mr. Teeterwaller wasn't the PC, but maybe a distinct, eccentric character as a PC was a little too spicy for 1998. (I know Tapestry is said to have come out of r.a.if discussions of whether you could have a PC with a distinct personality and that was 1996--but that's at least attempting to be an arty story-game, so maybe the idea that a puzzlefest could have a distinct character as a protagonist was not yet accepted. Though I could be wrong; it's not like I was around then.)

But of course, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything that could reasonably have been done differently at the time. When I reached the end of the game, I was interested to see that it has some "bonus materials", including extensive author's notes about the writing choices and some deleted scenes. The author mentions that Mr. Teeterwaller was a late addition, and that before that he had had another scene that provided the PC more direct motivation to infiltrate the plant. Reading the associated deleted scene, I couldn't help feeling that sticking with that first idea would have been a stronger choice. The PC would have still been pretty firmly a blank slate, but them being told (Spoiler - click to show)"These guys just stole some nuclear weapons, go disable them before they nuke the world" unifies motivation and action in a single character in a way that having a tag-along Mr. Teeterwaller urge you to get into the plant for unclear reasons doesn't.

In any case, though, the bonus materials were very interesting and I loved having the opportunity to see them; it's generally the kind of thing that would often be included in a postmortem, but given the game's release date it's highly unlikely this stuff would still be accessible had it not been included in the game itself.

I do think that this is a good choice for people who want a meaty old-school puzzler to sink their teeth into, and I can see why it's well-regarded on IFDB! But personally I place a lot of value on characterization and on harmony between gameplay and story, and those elements of The Plant didn't quite work for me.

Conveniently for the author of The Plant, his protagonist's car breaks down right in front of a sketchy detour leading to a mysterious plant off the main road. Equally convenient is the fact the boss of said protagonist is very eager to explore said plant...

While the circumstances leading up to the start of the game are a bit convoluted, once the story starts, I got drawn in fast and deep. The main reason for this is the excellent writing and pacing. The player's curiosity is piqued along with the PC's, and the boss's nudging adds some extra motivation to find a way into this mysterious facility.

The puzzles provide good pacing to the story, forcing the player to slow down and take note of what is happening. A good deal of actions trigger cutscenes, giving movement to the game/story, instead of being a static stage with the PC walking around it.

I did not encounter one bug, and only one puzzle that could be a bit more player-friendly in design ((Spoiler - click to show)When moving atop the glass ceiling, you have to LOOK each time you stop to see the particulars of your surroundings). Everything else is smooth, well clued (that doesn't mean easy...) and executed perfectly. The technical skill shown in the design of this game makes sure the player trusts that even though she is stuck, there is a way to win the game, and that it makes sense. (Lord of the IF-realm knows I've played games not so trustworthy...)

I'm still of two minds regarding the finale. It seemed like a profound breach of tone, but on the other hand, I did burst out laughing.

Very good original puzzles, extremely good pacing. Maybe a tad impersonal. Recommended.

I just played this through, and this is my favorite IF game next to Blue Lacuna. It wasn't terribly difficult but it was a lot of fun. The story and atmosphere managed to grip me, the characters (not a lot of them) were sympathetic, it is well-written, and the puzzles made sense. No 'guess the verb' or obscure item combinations at all. All in all I needed a hint only once, for an item I had not managed to collect. It was a bit short, though.