It Is Your Responsibility

It Is Your Responsibility is a short(ish) puzzle game about your protagonist's wild attempts to accomplish a task whose purpose is never clear, in a dystopian futuristic bureaucracy. The puzzles are mostly about smashing things up and recombining objects in slightly startling ways.

There are a few rough spots: a hatch can be referred to or discovered by accident before the game properly introduces it, and a few verbs give misleading failure messages until you use them in exactly the right way. (Spoiler - click to show)If the game tells you that putting something on the shard is useless, persist anyway -- you just haven't found the right object yet. Many of the puzzles I solved in reverse order, first noticing that something could be done with an object and only later realizing why that might have been useful to do. The design does have its strengths as well, however: the game does a good job of pointing the player towards usefully interactive objects, and it is so compact that it's hard to get too terribly lost. As far as I could tell, it is not possible to put the game into an unwinnable state.

The presentation of the game adds to the appeal. The Quixe website is attractive and has a handy hint list, and the comments on the Youtube trailer suggest that a number of players enjoyed the game despite little previous exposure to IF. Customized fonts and cover art help dress the piece up.

It Is Your Responsibility reminded me a little of Ryan Veeder's You've Got A Stew Going! It's not as thoroughly polished as Veeder's work, but the scope of the story and the tone and style of the puzzles were similar. Overall, not a bad debut work.