Traffic

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

A parser-driven, time loop scenario of interconnected cause and effect to untangle? Yes, please! One whose puzzles are both intuitive, yet lateral-thinking heavy? YES, PLEASE. One that minimizes hand holding and segues from pure puzzle play to underplayed but engaging dramatic beats? YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU, GIMME GIMME GIMME.

This game may represent the quickest ramp from my neutral, “Well, what have we here, Comp entry N+1?” that I start every game with, to “HELLZ yah, this is my jam!” You are quickly introduced to the looping gameplay core, with almost no guideposts to follow. I found this game, for a while, to be just about perfect at leveraging tight scenario descriptions and implicit parser assumptions to strike the wonderful balance between ‘what the hell do I do next?’ and ‘wait, this wild thing I tried actually has a response!’ It is a deep implementation that centers player initiative and for while continues rewarding and rewarding and rewarding it. The mechanism of looping itself is a wonderful ‘wot the hell?’ → ‘oh, I see what you’re doing!’ discovery.

It does seem though, like either that initial impression is not as precisely engineered as it feels, or that time ran out on implementation. At some point we segue from a gleaming clockwork of balanced expectations and rewards to what feels very placeholder-implementation-y. I have no insight to this author’s development process, but it feels like things were attacked in this order:

1. Overarching conceit, mechanisms and plot skeleton conceived, turned into outline
2. Detailed individual puzzle design, step by step through outline
3. Strawman mechanical implementation of entire work
4. Sequential text refinement, including cluing and mood/deduction balancing
5. Profit!

It further feels like this work only got halfway through step 4. Specifically, whereas early puzzles were masterpieces of player information balance, leaving us tantalizingly on the razor’s edge of deduction and head scratching, later puzzles were missing key pieces of info and expectations that made it unplayable without walkthrough.

There is one puzzle that requires NPC mood management, with no feedback on their mood making it impossible to detect, never mind gauge. Another requires you to examine something that is never remarked upon in text (at least text presented in my run through). (Spoiler - click to show)a cab, that unless you read the walkthrough are hearing about for the first time from me. Yet another requires clear spatial information to solve that is woefully under conveyed. Still another requires a bespoke verb that nowhere in the text is it hinted might be needed and/or interesting. The only way past ALL these is via the walkthrough. Which itself was sometimes deceptive, as if referring to an N-1 implementation and not the final release. (Still close enough to close the deal, but certainly leeching a lot of good will in the process.) All of these stand in stark contrast to early puzzles that hummed by comparison. Not helping matters, after some resignation and trying to follow the walkthrough, it appears I entered an unwinnable, endless loop and needed to restart. Though given I didn’t follow the walkthrough from the start, possible there was some state issue the walkthrough did not anticipate.

If I had to grade each of those above development steps, which, I’m not your teacher but why not? I would grade 1-B+; 2-A+++; 3-B; 4-D. The puzzle and scenario design just felt top notch to me, flush with promise of a truly engaging game. It just felt let down by final polish where later puzzles were noticeably clunkier to work than the early ones, and purely for reasons of player communication, not inherent design. You know what solves that though? More Polish!

Unfortunately, that late downgrade in polish really undid a lot of the early work’s promise. If I may borrow a conceit from my Spring Thing reviews…
Gimme the Wheel - what I would do next if it were my project: I would attack the last half and double and triple revise the text to produce the same level of finesse as the first half of the game. The bones here are as good as I’ve seen, and the first half SHOWS how capably things could be balanced. Traffic 2.0 could be something special.

Played: 9/10/24
Playtime: 1.25hr; incarcerated, looped, restarted following walkthrough
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy->Mechanical/Notably Intrusive puzzle cluing
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless