The Plant

The Plant begins with your boss's car breaking down in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere. Mr Teeterwaller, your boss, seems entirely ineffectual so it is left to you to get the situation in hand. Unfortunately, things soon get very OUT of hand as you witness a dramatic incident outside the industrial plant of the title. In rather suspicious fashion (I thought) the hitherto totally-wet-lettuce-like Teeterwaller decides he wants to break into the plant to see what is going on, and he wants you to help him! It smelled like a stitch-up to me, but as I didn't have anything better to do I went along with it.

The game was written in 1998 (quite modern by my standards!) and the story has a flavour of the X-files, which was quite an influence at the time. At several points the story is revealed in cut-scenes, where you are watching events unfold but you can't really influence them. You can still type commands but in practice you end up just typing 'wait' repeatedly until the action has finished. No doubt it would be more immersive if you could get more involved in the action, but it works fine. I agree with the author's notes, where he says this was a better way to tell the story than just presenting huge blocks of text (while acknowledging the weaknesses). Incidentally I thought the menu of 'additional content' at the end of the game was a nice touch.

The best part of The Plant for me was the quality and variety of the puzzles: I really enjoyed solving them. Overall, the game is very tightly designed and well thought-out. The modern industrial setting is also very well suited to adventuring and it didn't feel like the game was unfairly restricting my movement or what I could try to do at any point. I kicked myself that I referred to a walkthrough too quickly when I was stuck on one occasion - perhaps cheating myself out of that elusive feeling of cleverness when you finally solve a puzzle. ALL of the puzzles were logical and sufficiently well set up and clued to make them feel fair. Also, there were no throwaway easy puzzles of the basic lock-and-key or fetch quest types, so kudos to the author.

This is the first time I have played a TADS game and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the parser and the types of interaction and manipulation of objects that it was capable of. As the author Michael Roberts also wrote TADS, I wondered if the game was partly a kind of tech demo to show what was possible with the engine. Maybe that is true, but as The Plant was released well after the launch of TADS2 and years before TADS3 I don't think that was its primary purpose. With all the wizardry on show, like the fire hose that could be dragged around, and the intricate machinery in the warehouse, and the garage opener settings, and all the unusual 'Blottnian' verbs you could try, it was a bit of a surprise that the parser fell down by not accepting simple commands like TALK TO and LISTEN.

I suppose the game shows its age a little with some of the ponderous mechanics, especially when manoeuvering the window cleaning platform, or trying to fathom that blinking card machine! I also felt that some aspects of the game were under-developed, for example, it would have been great to be able to get the dog to follow you to the plant to solve another puzzle (I was expecting this). Mr Teeterwaller, according to the author's notes, was not part of the original design of the game, but was added in. It shows somewhat, because he follows you round being useless and copying what you do, but he can't be utilised in solving any of the puzzles. A missed opportunity!

Generally, the game is most enjoyable for the puzzle solving and strong implementation. The atmosphere is also well crafted, and the story has an interesting and dramatic conclusion. Some of the world-building feels a little tongue-in-cheek in the classic Infocom style, I'm particularly thinking of all the stuff about Blottnia, which I guess is like a fictitious former Soviet republic. This detracts slightly from the otherwise serious tone of the game.