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Review
I beta tested this game.
This is one of two games this year to be co-written by Xavid and which implement the fun map-building extension used in Xavid’s earlier game Future Dreams. It looks good in both games!
This game is wildly ambitious, and the concept is clever: you take people’s intents (and even more, later) and move them around to each other.
This concept has been used before (most clearly in Delightful Wallpaper) but never on this scale. This game is very large, with three sections that easily could have each been their own IFComp game.
The game expands in the middle so that it has cubic complexity. You can apply any of one category of object to another category of object to each person in the game.
This creates an enormous state space unlike anything I’ve seen before (except possibly Andrew Schultz’s Threediopolis with exponential complexity). In my experience, even quadratic complexity can be crushingly painful (I wrote a murder mystery where any topic can be combined with any other topic).
This is both good and bad. On the good side, it provides freedom, and that’s imperative for most parser games. On the other hand, without careful guidance, the complexity overwhelms the player and the game becomes frustrating.
For me, the game had generally enough hints so that solving puzzles wasn’t too hard (I replayed much of it before this review). The final act, though, I find very difficult indeed, and it was beyond me.
I enjoyed the writing in this a lot. This game is verbose, and riffs on things from quantum mechanics to religious symbolism. It’s clever and witty. As an IF ‘historian’ I’m very interested in its placement; the nice graphical elements are the kind of thing that, in the past, have raised the scores of games a lot, while the complexity may or may not have an effect on the outcome. In any case, I’m glad I played it, and feel inspired by it as an author.
+Polish: The game seems bug-free, and the map is nice.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is really solid.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are clever
+Emotional impact: Parts of it are very funny
-Would I play again? The increasing complexity and overall size of the game are fairly intimidating!
