The Plant

I'm not given to the humor of the lower bodily stratum at all, and I especially dislike flatulence jokes. At the same time, however, while stuck in this game about halfway through, I amused myself quite a bit by wondering if the author had implemented: (Spoiler - click to show)TEETERWALLER, FART UNDER VENT or ASK TEETERWALLER TO FART INTO BALLOON.

Sorry. The actual solution came to me soon afterwards, but I tell this to illustrate what I think was something of a missed opportunity in this well-constructed game. Your companion is avidly interested in what you discover, to the point that he's willing to display significant personal courage; but, in my playthrough at least, he had comparatively little to say about anything that he saw happen. I read in some earlier reviews of the game that Teeterwaller would comment on or even give you hints about some of the machinery you discover, which would seem logical, but I noticed very little of this in my playing.

Other than that quibble, however, this was a satisfying game to solve without hints. I was stuck twice, but the solutions came to me after a bit of thinking. I never quite understood what was happening with Blottnya in this storyworld, but it's possible that I didn't pay enough attention to the expository text. (It's difficult sometimes to read closely the background material when you don't know if it has something to do with the obstacle-puzzles in an interactive fiction.) I also wondered, without trying, if certain other characters in the game would respond to the linguistic discoveries you made, but I didn't really try this out.

One of my favorite books on a related idea is Roadside Picnic, and I think the way that the concept of technology transfer is presented in that novel is much more convincing, but that would have been a very different (and much darker) game.