Coloratura

Coloratura is an excellent science fiction game.

In a sense, the game gives you two stories in one. Foregrounded is the story of the alien PC, who drives most of the events in Coloratura. But the humans on board the ship experience the alien's actions very differently, and therein lies the second story. The way that Coloratura allows you to experience these two stories simultaneously is, well, brilliant.

I have mixed feelings about the puzzles in Coloratura, though. The puzzles are fairly easy, but that's not because the solutions to the problems you face are naturally apparent. In fact, these solutions are generally not actions that would easily come to mind at all. However, the puzzles are made easy by the game repeatedly hinting at what you should do next. I find that off-putting with puzzles, and it affected my enjoyment of the game.

To be fair, though, there's a quite difficult design problem to be solved here: A game with an alien PC is going to be played by humans who have no good intuitive sense of the actions that alien PC is easily capable of taking. To avoid a game with an "other" PC being unfairly difficult, then, such a game has to slowly teach the PC's abilities to the player. Coloratura does this some - but, in my opinion, not enough.

Still, this is a relatively minor point. Coloratura is a great game, and its greatness lies in the tension it creates between the story of the alien - who wants something basic, understandable, and just - and the story of the humans who experience the consequences of the alien's actions as horrific.