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Sci-fi that works, even for non-sci-fi fans, December 4, 2021It's rare that finding a hang in a game helps you appreciate it more, but that's what happened in Mermaids. Certainly there was enough to appreciate beforehand, in this high-production-value science-fiction tale where you take a crew to one of Jupiter's moons, crash, and meed mermaids and mer-sharks. It's not just about the technology. As a captain of a research spaceship, you have ways of escaping (relatively lax) imprisonment, a chase through or under an iceberg, and ultimately some moral choices to make at the end.
So where was the hang? It was in the iceberg maze, in chapter 4 of 5. Mer-shark ambushes were too frequent, and I couldn't figure clues of when they were close by. I somehow missed the "survey" command that pinged where to go next. So I got a bit frustrated and hit F5 to restart and play chapter 5. MoG let me choose how I'd behaved, since I didn't save my game. Now this had also been done in At King Arthur's Christmas Feast, but there, the choices varied less, in order to remain faithful to the source material. Here, it acted as a nice hint of things to retry without spoiling too much. I'm the sort of person who enjoys picking apart all the story lines, so I was glad MoG recovered so well from the hang. Robustness in programming is a good thing.
Pacing is also good. The "action" chapters are 2 and 4, with dialogue in the odd-numbered chapters. In chapter 2, you have a very hands-off house arrest. Talking repeatedly to the warden turned up empty threats of actual imprisonment, and it couldn't have been by accident. That combined with the choices on starting chapter 5 makes for something to poke at on replay. Though the dialogue (chapters 1-3) felt up and down to me. Your crew consists of V.C, a pilot who felt nondescript, Emmett, who is not very likeable and knows it, but more importantly, knows his stuff ("the geyser guy,") and Hyun Jae, whose mother is on one of the research flights that vanished. Hyun Jae knows her mother is (was?) a better researcher than she is, and that makes her the most interesting of your crew. Later there's Cixatli, a mermaid guide who moves the story along by being there, but I felt she could have done more. But it all feels quite well thought out and worth following, even if some of the prose and dialogue feels flabby. Being able to fiddle with the different endings in chapter 5 made up for that. You have big choices of whether to stay and leave at some point, and you learn what happened to Hyun Jae's mother.
I felt like things fit very well in MoG even if they didn't totally shine. Part of that is maybe because I'm not really a science fiction fan. But it did feel consistently well-organized in the big picture. The graphics and music felt appropriate without being intrusive. The world building is there, and replayability is built into it. It feels like an entry that may not be anyone's utter favorite, but I'd have been shocked to see it in the bottom half. The effort put into it by the authors is clear, and I enjoyed it, but my thoughts tended toward "Yes, I see the authors put in a lot of good effort" instead of the fully immersive "wow, this is just neat! You have to play this now!" Still, if you are playing through the IFComp 2021 entries, it's worth more than a drive-by look.
