Project Postmortem

It’s unfair to Project Postmortem to compare it to The Mysterious Cave, a pretty-but-buggy Adventuron game that consists of one basic puzzle and takes five minutes to play. I didn’t run into any bugs in this tale of academic skullduggery, and while the plot is neither especially novel nor robust – you’re tasked with tracking down a report showing that the research underlying a thesis with big economic potential was falsified, and then need to escape the vengeful postdoc when he comes gunning for you – it at least exists to provide a motivation for the action. The custom parser works well enough, modulo some slight infelicities of implementation, like few objects having descriptions and OPEN FOLDER getting the response “you can’t open the folder” while X FOLDER gets you “You open the folder and skim the contents…” And there are some pleasant features to counterbalance those small bits of awkwardness, like a fun menu-based system for interacting with computers that winds up pivotal to the game’s puzzle.

There’s the similarity and the awkwardness, you see: this is another one-puzzle game (maybe one and a half if you count “unlock the filing cabinet with the plainly-visible key”). The puzzle itself is okay, I suppose – you need to create a distraction to slip through the fingers of the blood-crazed academic, taking advantage of some cutting-edge capabilities of the computer network (Project Postmortem appears to be a nineties period piece, so don’t get too excited). It’s not especially challenging, since there aren’t any red herrings or potential alternate paths to throw you off, and it’s a bit silly that even if you don’t quite get the timing right, you can try again with no penalty, but it’s hard to fault a game for being merciful. Still, between the short playtime, the straightforward gameplay, the underdeveloped plot, and the unremarkable prose there’s as little here to praise as there is to condemn; as one episode in a larger thriller, I might consider it an effective setpiece, but it’s not really up to the rigors of standing on its own.