LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup

I sat there for a few minutes in silence after finishing this game. I needed to digest what I had just experienced, and I had tears in my eyes.
I've not played many pieces of IF that effected me this profoundly.
I'll bet the non-spoilery things out of the way first, but then there'll be massive spoilers.
I love the set up, that it's played as though you're actually controlling a robot that's been dropped off at the site to salvage anything that's been left behind, and that the output reflects this with it being in 1st person present. I imagine that must've been a pain to get right. I remember when I first tried playing it back when it was originally released that some of the prompts like the one for quitting were a bit messed up.
I also love that the usual save, restore and undo commands are described as being an experimental time folding system.
I don't think it's too spoilery to say that there's more going on than just a treasure hunt. For years I thought it was going to be a murder mystery, but no, I was extremely wrong.

And here is where I'll get into spoilers, although if you've read other reviews you'd probably know what it's about already.

(Spoiler - click to show)You find technology that allows people to experience simulations created for it like they're lucid dreams. It's like the ultimate VR system, and one's still loaded up. It's a program that lets you experience what it was like being a young female slave called Lynda on the plantation you have been instructed to search.
Now, I'm a white woman. So I don't think it's my place to comment on if the scenes in this part of the game were sensitively portrayed. So I will just talk about how it personally made me feel.
I was horrified even though I sort of knew what to expect. I also felt completely helpless even though it was just a game. The robot I was controlling was being brutally punished and forced to work in the fields, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I assume that if this was real, I would be sat all comfortable in an office somewhere miles away, watching this robot telling me exactly what was being done to them, and exactly how they felt now they had a sense of self, rather than just being a box of microchips. And I had put them in this situation.
All i could do was give them commands. My main goal was finding a way out of the simulation, so I thought instructing them to perform a shutdown would stop it. But no, the robot begged me to tell them to cancel. When I did, they said something like "Thanks, Master Goldfinch". that did me in.
How I kept playing the game from there is a mystery to me. By then, I was in bits over a fictional robot who thought I was their master that I just wrote "I am not your master" into the parser and hit enter, but the game just thought I wanted to check my inventory. I wanted the robot to be free but all I could do was carry on giving them orders.
So I set about trying to free Linda, which I didn't manage. I went the wrong way while trying to find how to escape and ran into the master. What happened to her them was despicable.
Now back into the present the robot still was sentient and aware of what they had experienced, and was begging for freedom, so I told them to drop everything and leave. I wouldn't have cared if NASC hadn't let me off.
Then it was finally over. I just typed quit after reading the credits and whatnot and just sat there.
The reason I have only given it 4 stars is that some locations didn't change their descriptions to reflect what the robot had experienced, which broke the emersion slightly. I'd much rather give it 4.5 stars but that's not an option.
So all that long ramble to say that it's a must play, but make sure you are emotionally prepared for it, if you even can be.

LASH is a long, well-polished game by Paul O Brian. This game predates the Earth and Sky games by a year.

This game has a major twist, so some of this review will be in spoilers.

The first half of the game is a scavenger hunt similar to adventure or Zork but in a near future world. You command a partially organic robot. You collect items for money.

(Spoiler - click to show)This half is a shame. None of the puzzles matter at all besides entering the large steel door. When you do, in the atric you find a realistic simulation of the slavery era, where you take the identity of a young girl. It seems open and difficult, but this part of the game is completely linear with very mild puzzles. Once you complete it, you return to the real world where you and the partially organic robot deal with its future.

This is a psychologically intense game, with some strong profanity, racial slurs, torture and rape, presented in a non-gratuitous way.

LASH is an intriguing game, and one of the must-play works of modern interactive fiction. (Must-play, that is, for those interested in the development of the medium.) It starts of as a traditional treasure hunt with a gimmick: rather than exploring the ruined building yourself, you are hooked up to a robot you can command around. This is not exactly a split between player and PC, as some reviewers have said; rather, what we traditionally call the PC has been split into two separate parts. The first part gets the roles of narratee and commander; the second part those of executioner and focal character, as well as the normally non-PC role of narrator. This is basically the same set-up as that in Fail-Safe.

But as the player continues, LASH reveals itself to be anything but a simple treasure hunt. Tackling issues of race, violence and slavery, it not only attempt to say important things; it also silently but mercilessly mocks the shallowness of any fiction that revolves around looting, and the mindset of any player happy to just see his monetary score increase. (I suspect we are all of us such players.)

This game deserves to be played. It is well-researched, well-crafted, intelligent, and to a certain extent wise. It is not without its problems, but those can only be discussed within spoiler tags. Big spoiler tags. Huge spoiler tags. Do not enter these spoiler tags, ye who have not played the game!

(Spoiler - click to show)The slavery sequence has several problems, most of which have been pointed out by previous reviewers. The identification of human slavery with robotic slavery is only one of them: pulling this off would require a good amount of setting up the scenario of robotic slavery, and instead, we get almost nothing. A second problem is that the game seems to claim that we need to experience slavery first-hand in order to be changed by it; otherwise, why build something that goes beyond literature, movie and even virtual reality? But if this is true, then the game itself cannot work, since it only offers us interaction with a piece of IF. This weird tension cannot, I think, be resolved. But for me the greatest problem is that the slave narrative ends with apparently successful escape. Rather than exploring the true despair of inescapable slavery, we get something that is a little too reminiscent of Hollywood and historical romance:"it's your father" + somewhat happy ending. Hm.

But these criticisms should be understood for what they are: taking something that is impressive and thinking about how it could be even better. LASH is far more sophisticated and thoughtful than most IF, including most award-winning IF of the past years. And sometimes, it is pure gold, as in this exchange:
> take bolls
[I recognize that you are a human, and therefore unaccustomed to the endlessly repetetive tasks that we machines are asked to do for most of our lives. Therefore, if you like, you may command me simply to WORK UNTIL SUNSET, and avoid any boredom you may be experiencing.]

Finally, a few words about the writing. It is generally very good, although in certain places there are large text dumps of the kind IF readers dread. The fact that they occur as menus helps, but they still should have been paired down or spread out more.

Finally finally, allow me to pick one nit. This is not the way to invoke Dante:

"The drawback is that on summer days like this one, the kitchen is as hot as the bottom ring of Hell."

The bottom ring of Hell, where Lucifer is contained as he tortures Judas and the murderers of Caesar, is a huge lake of ice. As a result, it is not very hot. (I wonder to which circle of Hell I will be condemned for this nit. That of the prideful and the boasters, no doubt.)