Focal Shift

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'.