Interface

This game was inspired by early Infocom games. Your uncle puts you in a robot's body and sends you home with a secretly subversive employee.

It's fairly short, with about a half dozen puzzles, usually where you are presented with an obstacle and have to find an object to defeat it.

Somehow, it reminded me of the newer game Nine Lives by Merlin Fisher. Both are fun little old school games set in a house with similar aesthetics.

An “old-school romp” the author calls it—and one that wisely avoids any flaws of its old sources of inspirations. You (or your mind or soul or consciousness or whatever) happens to be trapped inside a small robot, and you must figure out how to reclaim your body.

The puzzles are fairly easy; the game is polite (in the Zarfian sense—you can’t put it in an unwinnable state, and if you die, simply undo your last move) with a few in-game hints and even a non-spoiler map; writing is straightfoward in style and quite decent in quality, and there are no major bugs (one bad typo in the Competition version, though—the player can only refer to a bunch of property tags as “tage” rather than as “tags”); it’s probably finished in no more than two hours.

There were some nice details in it, too: the way you have to accustom yourself to your robotic body e.g., and (for once!) a perfectly acceptable in-game reason for a four items inventory limit.

All in all I’d say it’s presumably a good game for beginners, also—or even especially—for kids.

The first thing one will notice about Interface is the overly wordy prologue: a verbose description of a somewhat tired setup, written passably and competently, but without any real excitement. However, once the actual playing begins, one will find that the game is good fun with solid implementation, satisfying and sensible puzzles and interesting style and atmosphere. Ultimately a solid and enjoyable game, if imperfect.