Word of the Day

I actually woke up this morning, after playing WotD all night yesterday, finally grasping what was going on.

This is a well structured, almost puzzle-less sci-fi, with a brilliant PC and an incredibly detailed backstory, which could have aimed, imho, at a much higher outcome.

The most intriguing things revolve around racial (and racist) themes, told through the eyes of a special creature whose sole businesses in the universe seem to be procreation and money. And money because of procreation.
There are aspects of the subplot which are genius: the mating techniques of different races; how an Outworder sees us (provided the Inner Worlders are us); how racism can dwell in close environments; segregation.

Unfortunately, the story is presented through an endless array of posts and notes, and via the comments (on dead bodies) by a cold PC, who’s prime feature seems to be the lack of any empathy with anyone except her distant relatives and lovers. All of this sums up to a distinct vibe and a cool backstory that, in the end, fails in finding a route to the final outcome.
The atmosphere is strong (I was actually scared by the continuous opening and closing of doors, hinting at another survivor— the ship is full of dead bodies after an initial “incident”) although there is not much to do except reading tons of backstory. And this is first flaw of an otherwise impressive game.

Style apart (the text needs some more intense editing, due to the generative process it has to sustain), the fact that the main action you continuously do is reading notes or long flashbacks hinders the gameplay a bit. This sums up to the fact that navigation is hard due to a very symmetrical and squareish map (a map is provided and I would say it is fundamental for your survival).

But the main aspect — the thing that, eventually, lowered my experience most — is that, of all the important backstory told, the one which is central to the final twist (and there IS a final twist!) is overlooked enough that I simply forgot to notice. Saying more means spoiler, so I have nothing to add, if not that a much more “central” approach to something inside the ship would have done a better job in causing the final wow-effect.

Finally, the endgame, too, looks muddled and I failed to actually get what was happening in the ship until I woke up this morning with the proverbial epiphany.

To recap: I wish the main story was more “main” and the sub-plots (about race, gender, and the overall backstory) ended up being sub-plots and not the big finger in front of the moon. I wish I could understand more about the plot, something my “4-Good” ending didn’t convey (who was the one opening and closing the doors? I understood this after an 8-hours sleep, never having seen him during play!). I wish I could read less and do more, as a piece of Interactive Fiction should allow.

This said, I enjoyed this game a lot, and it frankly had me holding tight to the chair here and there, for some nice, perpetual sense of danger. A calm post-comp reset of the game is all it’s needed to put these few things straight.

This game kind of threw me off at first; I used the walkthrough, which seemed super unmotivated, and some large pieces of occasionally-awkward text made me not like it as much.

But then lglasser said she loved it on her twitch stream, as did an Italian IFComp judge, so I gave it another shot, walkthrough-free.

This time around, I liked it. All reasonable commands seemed to be accepted. The game allowed a great deal of flexible exploration and a money system that worked. Exploration was all that was needed to trigger the story, and the hint system was just strong enough to get me through and just vague enough to make it a challenge.

It seemed oddly fixated an alien mating systems, but it was more National Geographic than anything else.

This game has possibly the most misleading title that I've ever encountered in a work of interactive fiction. Although the name suggests wordplay, there is nothing of the kind to be found within.

That's what it's not. What it is is harder to define. There are elements of mystery, heist, treasure hunt and survival horror, and in some places it seems to be looking longingly toward AIF. The game portion has a split focus between making it to the end alive and collecting valuable items along the way, and the story lies somewhere between political thriller and methodical heist. Gameplay is very constrained by the intended scene structure (i.e. "on rails"), which lends a choice-like feel to the work.

Most people discussing this game mention the interesting player character. She is a kind of alien, essentially humanoid but with such vast differences in culture that it can be hard to fully adopt her perspective. The PC is indeed the standout feature of this work, presenting an alien psychology that colors the whole playing experience.

The overall writing style tends toward the leaden and repetitive. In part this seems to be the consequence of a particular system of producing responses tailored to the current state of the PC's knowledge. The system is a solid concept from a technical sense, but it very much needed to be refined in its execution -- at many places it seemed to be malfunctioning in small ways. This game was written in Inform 6, and producing such a system under that language was a larger technical challenge than it would be today. Unfortunately, the author Richard Otter's reach seems to have substantially exceeded his grasp in this respect -- perhaps a collaboration with a more experienced programmer would have been desirable.

The game bills itself as science fiction, but it's a strange kind of science fiction that is difficult to go along with if one prefers the harder type. Some of the imaginary technology is nonsensical (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. a propulsion system based on biological cells), as are some of the engineering choices (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. an "airlock" that opens directly to space). These sorts of things were already straining my suspension of disbelief, and it was finally broken after the first glitchy encounter with an NPC.

This is a very distinctive work, however, and a standout effort at inventing aliens that are more than just "people with funny masks," and these features make it worth exploring if one is prepared to look past the flaws. A thorough debugging and second pass at the prose would do much to improve my estimation of this work, but as it is I can't give it more than two stars, meaning "there's something there, but it needs improvement".