Deep Space Drifter

Deep Space Drifter is another historically-significant game that has aged very poorly. Its place in history seems to be roughly akin to Curses, in that it was produced by the author (Michael J. Roberts) of its development system (TADS), presumably motivated by the twin goals of producing a game of the type the author liked while also serving to exercise said system.

The first time I played this, the PC died from explosive decompression after opening the hatch that apparently connects the cockpit directly to the outside. (It was not clear from the skimpy description that yours is a single-room spaceship.) The second time I played it, the PC died of sudden asphyxiation after the ship runs out of air in 20 turns. OK, then.

There are only two meaningful actions to take in the opening vignette -- pressing two buttons. In doing so, your ship will be automatically docked to a space station that serves as the first half of the setting. Since there's nothing of interest to do on your ship, it seems that, as a matter of design, one might as well have started the story with the docking sequence already accomplished.

Within the first few turns, hunger and sleep "puzzles" announce themselves. The problems to be solved consist only of locating food items and a place to sleep. You cannot sleep in your pilot's chair pre-docking because you're too worried about your survival, but you can take a nice refreshing nap on the couch in the "main room" of the exploding space station. The primary purpose of requiring sleep seems to be to deliver a dream that will serve as a clue later on. There is no purpose to requiring food.

I guess I should have trusted my gut feeling and just abandoned this game, but I wanted to see it through, so I started to consult the walkthrough. Most everything that counts as gameplay involves overcoming simplistic "tab A in slot B" obstacles, in a setting whose realism is limited solely to creating challenge-less difficulty (such as an inventory limit, and the need to lug around a single heavy power source). As Rovarsson's review notes, even keeping hold of your inventory is an annoyance in itself. Most old school games in this vein interject plenty of humor as a consolation for the frustration created by the arbitrary roadblocks, but the humor here is restricted to a long series of "___Master 2000(tm)" jokes. (Ironically, one line that I thought was an amusing throwaway joke about a fuse being "conveniently" located on the roof of a space vehicle turned out to be an accurate description of the situation. It stopped being funny.)

I'm generally OK with the old school style, which is often exclusively composed of this type of interaction. However, the network of interlocking tasks and obstacles that present themselves are usually intertwined with a narrative progression, such that advancing through even simplistic puzzles rewards the players with a steady progression through the story. That's not what happens here. Quite often, there isn't even a non-standard response to indicate that a significant action was special in some way.

The few puzzles that require thinking seem very much under-clued. (Spoiler - click to show)Can you guess that the red square is the one that controls the landing shuttle, or that it's the one you need to modify with the mysterious computer? Can you guess that you need to provide the security robot with the vacuum cleaner (hope you brought it along!) in order for your program switcheroo with the cleaning robot's tape to have a useful effect? Do you care to decode the black box of a reactor control system whose buttons are unlabeled but apparently execute nonsensical functions?

This game's writing style seems close to that of a Scott Adams game. (I've never played those, so I'm making this comparison based on second- and third-hand knowledge.) Room descriptions are so brief and unevocative that they don't even count as thumbnail sketches -- they barely meet the minimum functionality of listing the location's general type, exits and key objects (if any). Object descriptions mostly serve to confirm that the object exists as something interactable.

Lest you think my treatment above unduly harsh, allow me to quote a passage from the TADS 2 Author's Manual that describes the development of the game:

"After formulating the basic plot of the game, and mapping out the portion that takes place on the space station (roughly the first half of the game), we started implementation. We had a basic idea of the second half of the game, but it wasn’t even mapped.

Implementation went well for a while, but as we got further along, we started to run into details in the first half of the game that were dependent upon details from the undesigned second half. We improvised some details, and left others for later. As we did this, a strange thing happened: we started to realize that there were holes in the plot, and weird little inconsistencies that hadn’t occurred to us until we needed to think about details. As a result, we started to change our basic ideas about the second half, which led to even more inconsistencies and plot holes. It was like digging in sand, and before long we decided to throw out the entire original plan for the second half and start over.

However, we had so much time and effort invested in the space station that we didn’t want to throw it away. Instead, we tried to design a new second half that fit in with the existing first half. From this point on, the battle was lost. We went through a series of essentially unrelated plots for the game, trying to fit each new plot to an even larger set of existing implementation. We’d plan a little, implement it, then discover that the plan wasn’t working and would have to go - but the programming work we did would have to stay. The swamp, the cave maze, and the shuttle represented so much work that we couldn’t contemplate throwing them away, so whatever we came up with had to include them somehow; for a brief time, we were actually going to make the swamp a 'Swamp Simulator' because it was the only way we could make it fit.

In the end, we were totally sick of writing Deep Space Drifter, but refused to let the project die before it was complete for psychological reasons. To me, this attitude shows through in the last half of the game; I think there’s a room on the planet whose description is something like this: 'This room is very boring; you can leave to the north.' In fact, I think the entire game reflects its history: the space station is full of things to do, it has some nice running jokes, and it’s stylistically consistent. The planet, on the other hand, has an empty, barren feel; it’s spread out and there’s not much to do. The only parts that are interesting are essentially unrelated to each other and to the story in general, a reflection of having been forced into the game whether they belonged or not.

I’m not saying that Deep Space Drifter is a bad game - I like the space station a lot, and the puzzles on the planet are very elaborate and elegant. But the game has some serious flaws, most of which I attribute to the long, chaotic process of design and implementation."

Having gotten to the end via the walkthrough, I can't even begin to imagine having fought my way through this piece without "cheating." Can you guess your reward for having worked out a ridiculous "puzzle maze" that takes over a hundred moves to complete in the walkthrough? (Spoiler - click to show)The villain is chased away by a space beaver. You get to learn through dying just when is the best time to launch from the planet in an escape ship. Then you are picked up by the space highway patrol and thrown in the brig for operating an "unspaceworthy" vessel. Nice.

The amateur historian in me feels compelled to give this work at least two stars for recognition of its landmark status in 1990; in the aftermath of Infocom's demise and amid the general collapse of the commercial market, this game surely demonstrated that it was possible to produce large-scale, programmatically-complex works comparable to those that had set players' expectations in the preceding decade. However, there is nothing to recommend this work in terms of entertainment value, and the bulk of the educational value that can be gleaned from it is more easily obtained from the quote above than from the work itself.

Phew! Someone heard you! When adrift in interplanetary space, chances are slim that anybody would hear your distress signal in time. You received the coordinates, you probably have just enough juice left in the fuel cell. So yeah, very fortunate to be underway to that big... distant... abandoned... space station that is now being pelted with debris... and fired upon by a giant laser from the planet's surface...

Hmmm... Maybe not that fortunate, but you either dock here or die in your broken down spacecraft.

The space station in Deep Space Drifter is a compact and effective puzzle-space. A small number of rooms to explore, each with a clear function. Enough objects lying around to get a notion of the backstory and aid in some nifty puzzles. And there's a robot! The environment is sparsely but adequately described, and every few turns the narrative voice informs you that the station is shaking around you as a result of an explosion or an impact. While these messages help with the sense of being in a larger and quite vulnerable place, they do become repetitive to the point where you just skip them.

I dropped my inventory a lot in this part of the game. And not because I typed DROP a lot. I didn't methodically investigate, so I don't really know if it's a bug, if you lose your inventory each time the station gets hit, or if there are an inordinate amount of actions that implicitly DROP ALL (SIT does this for sure), or a combination of all the above. What I do know is that I often arrived at my destination ready to tackle an obstacle only to find that I was empty-handed. That involved some backtracking.

Since the space station is abandoned and empty, just refueling your own spaceship won't work. So, in the next part, you go down to the planetary surface. The game from this point on is very uneven.
I loved zipping around the underground tunnels in the shuttlecar (yes...) There are two very satisfying puzzles. There are also two very large mazes. And that's a pity. I thought both mazes had a really good concept that was drawn out far into tedium and boredom. I frankly didn't care anymore and went with the walkthrough. The concept could have been kept intact, and the mazes shrunk down into 10 room navigational/timing puzzles that would have been more engaging.

Some good puzzles, some good fun, but ultimately not enough.