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.