Inevitable

Kathleen Fischer is one of my favorite writers, with the conversation game Redemption and the romance game Masquerade.

The game is a departure for her, consisting of one huge mechanical puzzle. However, it still includes her trademark writing and memory system.

You are alone on a world whose people you saw die 20 years earlier. You roam about, remembering the tragedy, and solving puzzles to get your tool to repair your ship.

The puzzles is fiendish, even on easy mode. Hard mode is well night impossible.

There is no walkthrough, but I found some hints on googles archives of the old rec.games.intfiction site.

I recommend it for fans of big puzzles or haunting atmosphere.

I stand in awe. This game is so good...

Top fighter pilot during the past war, you now find yourself accompanying the Ambassador on a tourist trip to a place he slashed into submission from orbit just twenty years ago, while you were down there on a mission of your own. A heavy storm forces you to push him into his spaceship to take him to safety, leaving you alone and stranded on the surface with your storm-damaged plane. You might be able to fix it should you find your multi-purpose tool that you lent to the Ambassador. Maybe he dropped it somewhere during his escape?

As you search the area, you get re-acquanted with the strange towers that stand on the points of a great triangular field, and the massive Ziggurat that stands in the middle. Soon, driven by memories and an only half-understood inner urge, you find yourself unraveling the mysteries of these perplexing structures.

Inevitable takes place on a smallish map, readily memorized and easily accesible. You can oversee much of the area from several locations, making it feel bigger while at the same time tying it together into one big site. The descriptions are evocative while not overloading your brain with too much information.

Actually, the writing overall is extremely good. When exploring the different towers and examining scenery and objects, the text is efficient and to the point, almost cold in places. However, entering certain locations or finding certain objects brings back memories of your last time here, memories you would have rather forgotten. When remembering these, the writing becomes softer, even hesitant.

At its core, Inevitable is a puzzle game. It is actually one big puzzle with tightly interconnected sub-puzzles. Once you understand the overarching problem, the nature of the towers and the Ziggurat, the function of the sub-puzzles becomes clear. (Not their solutions however...) In this way, instead of other IF-games, Inevitable reminded me most of two point-and-click games I bashed my head against in the early 2000s: Chasm and Archipelago. (Ring a bell, anyone?)
The solutions to the obstacles are all logical, which does not make them any easier. I certainly needed some nudges along the way. (Thanks!)

The coding and implementation is top notch. Wrong attempts get helpful replies. You can GO TO locations if you don't want to traverse the entire map. The game starts in Default mode, but you can type EASIER or HARDER at the start of the game, depending on how masochistic you are.

What lifts Inevitable head-and-shoulders above other hard and smart and clever puzzlers is the dramatic backstory revealed in the memories. I felt strongly sympathetic towards the protagonist (I imagine it to be a woman, although the game doesn't say either way.) when she was reliving the final moments of the war through short but heartwrenching flashes of memory.

Extremely good game.

An older game submitted to the 2003 Spring Thing, Inevitable -- which is not to be confused with a 2017 work sharing the same name -- is a bit off the beaten path for the modern player, but it is an interesting stop on a tour of IF history.

The game offers adjustable difficulty, and I played it on the "harder" mode. This mode doesn't offer particularly hard puzzles as science fiction puzzlers tend to go, so unless you prefer games with few or no puzzles, I would recommend it.

The writing of the game starts out feeling a bit ponderous, but the player soon gets used to the serious tone. The player character is a military officer and space fighter pilot, whose planet recently lost an interstellar war. He or she is tasked with escorting an ambassador of the conquerors on what seems to be nothing more than a sightseeing tour of a now-abandoned city.

The opening sequence sets an interesting mood, with the protagonist's ship being damaged and unable to take off while a heavy storm rages outside. However, the rain abruptly stops and the mood just as suddenly shifts, leaving the player with the familiar task of scouring the empty city for what's needed to repair his ship. A glance at the horizon shows another squall line on the way, but (Spoiler - click to show)this is false foreshadowing that never ends up affecting the story.

As the player goes about this task, various interesting technical touches will be noted, which provide niceties that are relatively rare for the era. (This was the era immediately preceding the introduction of Inform 7, and the coding skill needed to achieve these in Inform 6 were decidedly above average.) The game offers a >GO TO functionality that isn't well-advertised but is a welcome affordance. A particularly nice touch was the way that the PC will considerately put everything aside before following your instruction to wade into water -- and then take it all back after emerging.

The overall style leans toward hard science fiction in that it's grounded in a realism informed by the characters fictional universe. The protagonist takes the futuristic items in inventory for granted, and much of the characterization comes in the form of timeless complaints about authority and regret over a woman from the past. At certain points the realism is inconsistent in its attention to detail, however -- for example, in a scene where (Spoiler - click to show) the protagonist must free-dive to obtain a long metal bar from an underwater structure some of the difficulties which might be expected in that situation (weight, awkwardness) are ignored. Also, there doesn't seem to be any function for certain items outside of demonstrating the nicety mentioned above, though arguably this is not wasted or unfocused work so much as a touch of hyper-realism for effect of the type I pointed to in my review of Anchorhead.

Certain significant parts of the interaction are definitely buggy, and other parts seem as though they might be. Only one issue rises to the severity of threatening the successful conclusion of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(a metal bar can become irreversibly stuck in a wall), but this is unlikely to be encountered in practice. The others that I noted (Spoiler - click to show)(a power tool magically performing its function while turned off, an item being described as being simultaneously on something and wedged into something, disambiguation messages for a particularly tricky sequence involving a complex shape) only create unexpected disruptions to the immersion. Said immersion is artfully achieved through vivid descriptions of the alien city environment and its varied technological artifacts; many reviewers compare it to the atmosphere of Myst.

The puzzle-solving is the core of the gameplay side of this work, and it was quite enjoyable. (Spoiler - click to show)Who doesn't like slowly reactivating derelict alien machinery? The game fulfills the promise of its hook and really shines here as the player makes progress through various obstacles. Only one puzzle seemed like a real problem to me, (Spoiler - click to show)a very important one involving a stone dolmen, but on review the issue seems to largely stem from an uncharacteristic shortfall in the description of the physical scene. In a complex spatial situation like that, I personally appreciate an abundance of information to make sure that the relevant details are communicated, and that style is followed assiduously everywhere else in the game. The worst case scenario is that you'll have to consult the walkthrough to get past that puzzle, which is hardly a catastrophe.

The two-star rating that I'm giving is based on the game's weaker side, which is its story. The narrative elements are interesting enough as their own framework, but they feel essentially grafted onto the gameplay framework -- they don't naturally interact and reinforce each other to improve the experience of both, which is the holy grail of interactive fiction. In addition to some very surprising revelations that seem like they should not have been withheld at the start (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. that the protagonist is in fact very familiar with the city, having lived there for years), I was left with significant questions about the plot, including but not limited to: (Spoiler - click to show)Why did the alien ambassador want to go there in the first place? Why did Rajan wait until the last second to intervene in the past? Why did the PC fixate on the woman with the green eyes in the past? That's not to say that the story was uninteresting -- it most certainly was not, and the flashback-oriented exposition is well-paced on a structural basis -- it's just that it seems like the story could have been quite different without affecting much of the experience of play.

The pacing near the end is irksome, slowed by some final puzzles when the narrative is trying to advance quickly. I personally found all of the available endings to be unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint, leaving the emphasis in my memory on the setting, atmosphere and puzzles, all of which are very well executed. I did have fun with this game, and I expect that most sci-fi fans will, too, and absent the not-quite-insignificant bugs I would probably give it three stars.