A Very Strong Gland

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This author has a strong brand, in my all of 3 years’ experience. Super zippy one-character input parsers that are very much on the puzzle/game side of the spectrum (over, say, narrative). Lots of clever lateral thinking bits. Here, you are an abductee going through a simple IQ test (which teaches you the dialect of this parser), then pressed into service to assist your abductors as mechanical misfortunes escalate.

The deductive problems are set against a backdrop of alien touch-based controls and only kind-of clear communication. For a good while, it was just about perfect. The alienness of your surroundings require trial and error to deduce what each new room or control is on about, then MORE to figure out how to leverage them to incrementally engage your hosts and deal with the ship problems. It is a super addictive mix of experimentation, deduction, then logical leaps. The zippy interface is the key here. Experimentation is so zippy, and feedback so concise and clear, you are constantly making progress in one way or another. At least to a point.

One room, one cluster of weird controls after another, just trying things gives reams of feedback to spin off of. The puzzles to solve are varied and interesting. Until… they stop being so. At about the one hour twenty minute mark, my mental machine stopped humming. I had seemingly (only seemingly. Clearly I was missing something) exhausted the controls - the cues clearly telling me manipulation was fruitless or outright removing obsolete controls. Certainly, the game was aggressive about depicting things that don’t feel controlly as controls, so I can’t rule out missing things, though exhaustive trial and error revealed nothing.

This is the point where I rued the absence of a hint system. Yes, the author generously offered to answer email hint requests - a model that unfortunately is not very helpful against my COMP navigation mode. For the first hour-twenty I was running on nitrous - my objective clear, the controls aligned against me opaque, but with enough handholds for me to grapple effectively. Then, when I discovered the the (Spoiler - click to show)cryo pods, suddenly my roadmap vanished. There are a few unused controls in the mix, one control that helpfully lists all the things that still need fixing, but given the work is all-in on its alienness (and given the wacky solutions to previous problems!) it is far from clear what road to even try.

At the one hour twenty mark, my experience unceremoniously shifted from one of two-fisted science to one of abject flailing. For forty minutes I zipped around touching/examining/aura-ing everything I could. And getting NO actionable feedback. It felt, suddenly, like a completely different game. Again, I fully acknowledge this is my problem. It was just weird to me, to be SO engaged and effective for so long, to encounter a puzzle that just… hid in the sand? No ideas, no clues I could discern, no signposts I could decode, nothing. It ended up being the parser equivalent of lawn mowering trying to exhaustively touch and observe the vast permutation of everything listed. And coming up empty.

This then, is the value of a robust hint system. A simple nudge in the right direction might be enough to have turned this brick wall into a small speedbump, and restored that fun, zippy experience that launched the game. Short that, I watched an engaging time devolve into angry frustration, then the most painful of IFCOMP gaming experiences: resigned running out of the clock. I cannot deny the sparks of that first hour, but as these things go, the last forty minutes dominate my memory of gameplay. This is a game that requires either: 1) you are smarter than me (a low bar to be sure); 2) a leisurely play model that allows for author engagement; or 3) a robust hint system. I can’t do anything about 1. 3 would have readily closed the deal for me. I don’t know that 2 will happen outside COMP judging.

Played: 9/28/24
Playtime: 2hr, “The spacesquare is currently sick. One door is wrong. The finder is lost. The propeller is dead. The changing room has a problem. The feeder is dormant.”
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: With an added robust hint system? who am I kidding, probably

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless