Focal Shift

The opening to this game tells you exactly what you're getting into: a good, classic cyberpunk heist, where a shady benefactor has hired you to do one last job before retirement, stealing some data from a big corporation and probably getting betrayed by the sponsor in the process. It wears its concept on its sleeve, and fortunately, it's a concept that I'm very much into.

It's a parser game written in Gamefic, a system I have no experience with (but want to look into now), and in general the system is very smooth to work with. I do wish it had a map or some sort of display of available directions, since I often found myself getting lost in the very small map, but my overall impression of the interface is positive.

The gameplay generally involves two things: hacking into devices, and "get X use X" puzzles. The hacking minigame is great fun, though I really wish it had been explained in the game itself instead of in the readme (I would _not_ have figured out the "grid" version without it), and the puzzles feel appropriately cyberpunk even when they're straightforward (scan a guy to find out what car is his, hack the car alarm to make him leave his post).

There are also some notable highlights in the writing, where the unadorned text conveys its point in a way that grand paragraphs probably wouldn't.

> \> get pencil
>
> You take the pencil.
>
> As you stand back upright, something else catches your attention from the corner of your eye.
>
> There's a dead body behind the desk.

Or, talking to your sponsor about another mercenary who was hired to take out the guards:

> "I'm surprised he was able to do that much. I broke his cover with a simple ID check."
>
> "Yeah, he wasn't too happy about that. You better hope you don't bump into him on the street."
>
> "How does he know I did it?"
>
> "I told him."

The twist was eminently predictable, but it's a staple of the genre for a reason, and it still felt good to know exactly what to do when it happened (the (Spoiler - click to show)faraday cage being nicely foreshadowed).

That said, there were some negatives too. In particular, typos or mistaken commands use up a turn, which is extremely aggravating when there's visible time pressure. And the hacking minigames are never explained in the game itself, only in the documentation. There were some other minor things that didn't really cause issues, but felt unpolished: the news articles on the TV, for example, are displayed in a random order, which is weird when some of them are meant to be followups to earlier ones.

The chain of puzzles also means there's generally only one thing you can do at a time, which means the start of the game involves a lot of fumbling around without guidance on where you need to go. The map isn't huge, so this isn't especially aggravating, but it did turn a tense in-medias-res start into a bit of a slog until I figured out which unmarked door would get me to the one device I could actually hack.

I had far too much fun with the "word" minigame, but found the other one tedious rather than fun—is there any strategy to it beyond checking every room to find the numbers you need? And the cyberware upgrade is nice, but you can access it right away at the beginning without solving any puzzles, hacking any devices, or facing any obstacles first, and there's no cost to it, so it doesn't really fit into the puzzle structure of the game. Putting a separate puzzle in front of that (maybe you don't have the money for it but can hack someone's device in the food court to steal what you need?) would help with all of these problems at once.

(I also found that device kind of confusing, because it completely trivializes the word puzzles, but in an unfun way—it lets you solve it by trying AAAAAA, BBBBBB, CCCCCC, and so on, but you have to do it by hand, which is just tedious.)

But I criticize because I want the game to be better, not because I didn't like it! Overall, this was a simple game, but it met all my expectations and I had a lot of fun with it. It's no grand work of literature, but neither are most of the things I write: it felt like it was done by someone who really loves the cyberpunk genre, and that elevated simple puzzles into a really enjoyable way to spend an hour.

There are few design challenges more vexing than the hacking minigame. They’re a nearly unavoidable necessity in anything cyberpunk: sure, you can let the player succeed with just a simple HACK COMPUTER, but that makes a skill that should be exciting and narratively significant just a big “I win” button, or you can go the other direction and implement a full emulation of running cracking programs and installing rootkits and what-not, but that’s incredibly high-overhead and likely to limit your audience. So the minigame is the least-worst option, as proved by such notable triumphs of game design as the PipeMania clone in Bioshock, the node-capturing abstraction of Deus Ex, and the flying-around-shooting-giant-shapes of System Shock.

So it’s to be expected that Focal Shift, a cyberpunk heist unembarrassed to be playing the genre’s hits (you’re a freelancer working for a shady client, with a job to raid a corporate databank and an experimental implant giving you an edge…) has not one but two hacking minigames; what’s more, pretty much all the puzzles bar one or two run through these systems, blurring the line between “minigame” and “actually just the game.”

It’s a bold move, but to its credit the game has the chops to back it up. It’s based on the GameFic engine, which I recently encountered in this year’s ParserComp entry Project Postmortem; I found it a solid platform for that demo-length game, and it confirms that impression in this full-sized experience. It does just about everything you want a modern parser system to do, down to seamless choice-based gameplay integration for dialogue, with no bugs that I ran across. As for the design of the minigames, the first is a Wordle-alike with a twist, and the second is a wandering-around-cyberspace-messing-with-a-keycode riff that escalates nicely; they also interact interestingly with the real-world layer, most notably with the option to solve a small puzzle in meatspace to upgrade your abilities in the first of the games.

The way the minigames communicate their rules to the player is inconsistent, however – because in neither case are you given the rules of the road. The second one seems linked to your new implant, and only comes into play towards the end of the game; I’ll keep the details vague since it is pretty clearly set up as a twist, but for all that I found it pretty easy to suss out via trial and error, and since the first time you experience it time pressure is light, there’s no penalty to replaying things, and the interface helps cue you towards what a correct solution will look like. The first minigame is a different kettle of fish, however. It’s recognizable a Wordle/Mastermind game – you type in guesses for six-letter passwords, and you get feedback based on how close you were to the right answer – but while I figured out that if the response shows you a letter in one of the blank spaces, that means you got it right, I was completely flummoxed about what the +s and -s that otherwise would appear, since they didn’t correspond to the “letter not present in solution” and “letter is in the solution but now in the right place” options that I was expecting. After finishing the game I checked the walkthrough, so now I understand that it’s doing something distinct, but at the time I worried I had just run into some bugs, so I wound up brute-forcing all of these puzzles. It was less than fun, and worse, it felt needlessly obfuscated because unlike the second minigame, which seemed like a surprise to the protagonist, there’s no indication that this first one is anything other than routine; surely there should be a manual, or quick flashback, explaining how the rules work, since there’s no diegetic reason for the main character to be flailing.

There’s not much to Focal Shift outside of these minigames beyond cyberpunk tropes, as I mentioned before, but I still found its specific take enjoyable. There’s a jaded-but-still-idealistic street doc, a double-cross, all the stuff that you want to see. Making the target of the job a financial tech company focused on the blockchain is also a decision that feels novel but completely natural for this kind of story. And there’s a sly humor to some of the writing; I especially enjoyed this dig from the client (who’s monitoring everything through the implant) when I stopped to watch TV so I could check out the worldbuilding being done by the news chyrons:

“You get your fill of world events, Brokaw? Chop chop. Let’s get this over with.”

Focal Shift isn’t a game that will stick with you long after finishing it, admittedly – it’s telling a story you’ve heard before, with a mechanical approach that’s its own but recognizably of a piece with a million other implementations of these ideas. But the level of execution is nonetheless high, modulo the decision not to tutorialize the main hacking minigame in order to non-diegetically increase the difficulty.

I've played three games now by Fred Snyder over the years, all written in his custom parser engine and all involving compact maps with suspenseful plots. I like this game the most out of them so far.

You play in a Cyberpunk-type world where you have an implant in your brain to let you identify and hack objects. Your mission is to retrieve information from the vault of a corporation.

The world model and implementation is completely lean, only implementing exactly what the world requires and nothing else. Every company in the building, every room, every person, is something designed to serve a purpose in the game (outside of one specific room). This has pros and cons; it lets the author do deep implementation and keeps the player from getting lost in a sea of red herrings. On the other hand, it makes suspension of disbelief harder when a corporate office has only 3 rooms. In my book though, I'd rather have a thin, lean, well-implemented game than an overstuffed poorly implemented game.

Besides a variety of NPCs (which I thought were pretty well done), the game includes two kinds of puzzles. I thought the first one was Wordle, but is wasn't, and the second one had me really confused for a second or two before I got it. For me, they hit a sweet spot of 'non-trivial' but 'not punishingly hard'.

This game is quite polished and has a smooth parser and a nice UI. I followed the advice from other players to look at the instructions for minigame #1 before attempting it, and was glad I did because I don’t think I would have figured that out on my own. However, I did get a bit tired of that puzzle by the fifth or so go-round. Part of the reason, I think, is that having 24 tries after getting the implant upgrade took away the sense of pressure and made me stop thinking very carefully about my guesses, whereas the two I solved with only 8 guesses had that sense of tension and needing to make every guess count.

My other main critique is the writing of the NPCs, of which there are six or seven. It’s immediately very clear that they only exist as pieces of the game’s puzzles; none of them interact with you until you approach them, and while some are introduced with a characterizing line like “A bureaucrat peers at the deck’s monitor with dead eyes,” others simply get “X is here.” Livening up those introductory descriptions (sure, Dr. Mohr is here, but what’s she doing?) and having them act more naturally—e.g., greeting you when you walk into their offices—would go a long way toward making them feel more like actual people and better integrating them into the game.

Overall though, if you're looking for a short, word- and grid-puzzley hacker game, you'll have fun with this one.