Number of Reviews: 5
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Escape Room, M.E., December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The classic closed room mystery makes an appearance! Here, a bloody body with no wounds, and a somewhat spare residence to extract clues from. It’s a parser game, so you are X’ing everything you can find, and asking your partner and the victim’s landlord anything you can think of. It’s a fairly quick play, but man is there a twist at the end.
For most of its runtime you are pushing against a Notably incomplete parser implementation where puzzles are harder than they should be due to terse descriptions that hide lower level details. The most egregious will not let you manipulate objects, but if you X an incidental object, only then moves items around for you. Puzzles like these are tough, because when you find let’s call it the Implementation Horizon, the level below which parser commands yield only ‘you cannot’ or ‘there is no,’ as a player you might conclude ‘this is a dead end, there’s clearly nothing more here.’ But this game will pierce that Horizon randomly with super important low level details amidst a sea of gaps.
It also has a few code breaking type puzzles - one of which is clever enough, but the other defies in-world credulity. It is nominally a mnemonic for a password, but it is the most convoluted mnemonic imaginable and nothing anyone would actually use. But it is a puzzle, and it can be solved, so there’s that.
Conversation similarly has a an Implementation Horizon problem - talking to the two NPCs about everything you find yields information, until you start getting ‘no answer.’ (Ignoring you is a curious choice for this messaging, given you are actively trying to solve a crime the NPCs are notionally invested in!) Made worse with incomplete synonyms. If you ask for details about the victim by his LAST name, you get an answer that suggests there’s nothing to learn. If you ask about his first name, hey, info! (Spoiler - click to show)If you ask about an autopsy you are told its not done yet. But lower level medical details are still in the chamber!
Inhabiting this unevenly implemented world are a protagonist and NPCs that are all but ciphers. The most human personality you encounter is through investigating the victim, and even there the details are spare and incomplete. All of this combines to a kind of representational reality, a parser-based psuedo-world, rife with simplifications, non sequitor logic puzzles, and short-hand logic leaps. Like animators only drawing three fingers because that’s representationally good enough.
Thankfully, the game does come with actually helpful hints to point the way through the darkness, at least as far as the parser-search. When you exhaust your environs, it’s time to solve the murder, via answering Who/What/Why questions. The first two questions reasonably trade on what you might have learned from your first half gameplay. But for that third… it’s like you jumped from an abstract cartoon mystery into the middle of a busy emergency room!
That final question encompasses DEEP cuts of biology, science and tragic inferences. Where most of the game was soft and well-meaning, suddenly the last question was gritty, clinical and super detailed! Boy, if you could have seen those options FIRST, before stopping the inquest… because it turns out, that you COULD ask about a lot of that. Based on the light gameplay, there was no hint that you SHOULD, but you could. I ended up taking reasonably educated guesses and hitting it, but it didn’t feel earned. The fact that that last question was so out of place relative the prior gameplay was shocking and kind of subversively fun. The fact that that level of detail was also implemented in conversation (if you go back and try it) was amazing. Sure, all of it deeply unfair, but amazing. I can’t say it justified the unnecessary struggling or elevated it above Mechanical, but I’m glad I saw it.
Played: 10/9/23
Playtime: 40min, “solved”
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably uneven implementation
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless