The Axolotl Project

In the Axolotl Project, alien life has at last been discovered, and closer to Earth than you might expect. But, this being Earth, an amoral corporation is exploiting the benign creatures for its own material gain. There are nefarious goings-on aplenty on the moon-base where you are based as a downtrodden intern. It seems like you will have your work cut-out to turn a dire situation around...but as it turns out, it's easy to navigate your way through the game with very little friction. In a game where you come very close to being killed, and the odds are stacked against you, it would definitely add to the tension and atmosphere if you could fail and get killed - but I don't believe you can.

This game has some positive aspects coupled with a couple of serious flaws. The drawbacks didn't completely spoil it for me, but it could have been a lot better. The addition of some actual peril would have helped. There are three parts to play through, and each one took me about an hour.

This is a choice-based game written with Twine, which is presented in the style of a classic parser game. You simply click the hyperlinks to navigate the world instead of typing commands. This succeeds at evoking the atmosphere of a dark sci-fi themed text adventure, as least to begin with. Sadly, the sheen wears off due to the lack of player freedom and mechanisms to very meaningfully deliver and solve puzzles. There is simply no way the player can miss an opportunity to use an object as a direct hyperlink is always offered at the appropriate time. It would perhaps have been better if the player had to go into their inventory to decide when to try using an object.

I liked the story, which had some thought-provoking and creative ideas in it, as well as a super-scale moral dilemma to wrestle with. I actually think the game is worth playing just for these aspects. There are certain parts of the story that are quite dark, including the opening segment, the end of part one, and the denouement, as well as the whole idea of exploiting the axolotls for monetary and human gain. The problem with the story is that it has quite an inconsistent tone. There's a lot of seriousness, dark themes, and some serious threats for the player-character to face down. However, our heroine, a downtrodden young intern, has quite a line in sassy remarks and put-downs, the tone of which just feel inappropriate when they are directed towards other characters. It's a shame, because there are a lot of witty observations in the text that did make me laugh, but somehow the themes of the story and the nature of the main character did not gel for me. I think the author was trying to leaven some of the heavier content with humour, but it just didn't work in the context of the whole piece. Similarly, at times, several of the characters veer more into caricature, or in one case, comic-book villain. Possibly this was a deliberate way to lighten the tone, but I'm not sure it was successful.

The quality of the writing is generally high, and this, together with the creative ideas in the story, generally decent characters, interesting setting, and apposite themes of corporate greed and ruthlessness makes the Axolotl Project worth playing despite its imperfections. As long as you are mainly hoping for story and not puzzles, you should be fairly happy.