Lockout

Recently I've been realizing that reviews mean different things to different people, and that everyone has different criteria for what they value in games. So I've been reading this author's reviews of other games to see what they consider important for success in a game and what scores should mean for a game, and this review and rating is calculated relative to that standard.

This is a classic puzzlebox. You are on a ship (I believe a submarine) and have gotten stuck in the control room due to an emergency. The door is locked, the alarm is blaring, and you have to find your way out.

This progresses in escape-room like fashion. Many of the puzzles present you with challenges that hint at a solution which you have not yet found, which is nice and lets you strategize. Finding numbers and codes is essential, as is carefully exploring and reading the text closely.

I only found one error ((Spoiler - click to show)typing ENTER (the correct code) ON THE KEYPAD gives an error implying that that didn't work, but typing CODE (the correct code) does work. The game does tell you to use the second one, but it's odd the first one gives a message implying the number is incorrect.). The relative lack of errors is remarkable for a first-time author, especially given the complexity of the game. The coding is very impressive.

As for the story and writing, the situation is presented as an important and dangerous one. The background for the ship, mission and crew is less present, however, mostly told through logs that describe events in methodical language. The ending is quite abrupt as well. As a first game designed to make a polished, puzzle-dense experience, I think it succeeds, but I think that it lacks a certain narrative element that I'm confident can be provided in the next game by this talented author.

The nuclear deterrent is frequently misunderstood as mutually assured destruction through glistening missile arrays just a trigger finger away from apocalypse. In reality, the nuclear deterrent disincentivizes proliferation primarily through the heartstarching inevitability of some undertrained overexcited gutreactor yaketysaxing cascading radioreactive incompetencies to chainreacted gigachernobyl grayouts. Did you know there are currently dozens of unexploded nuclear bombs lying on the seafloor? It just was kind of a routine thing during the Cold War, whoops, there goes another one.

Lockout’s nuclear submarine bears this rich legacy proudly. A desk in the engine controls has railings that “are useful to keep people from accidentally knocking things off the desk … one has to walk past the railing carefully because a piece came loose when Butterfingers wanted to show he could jump over it.” Perhaps we could have foreseen an issue when we entrusted our nuclear deterrent to Butterfingers, but then again, it seems we’ve not foreseen much of anything. The game’s setpiece puzzle is that the automated disaster response automatically seals off the engine room, stranding you, which raises several questions like, why would you do that, why do we even want to abandon our station in the engine room during an electrical incident, how is this the second time this has happened on this voyage, maybe we should just spend our tax dollars on roads or something. Moreover, an emergency red light strobes you blinded, so literally the first step in disaster response is shutting off the disaster response so you can respond to the disaster. More questions emerge as we do respond to the disaster, like why is the wheel that opens the tool cabinet impossible to open, why is there no battery in the door controls, how come almost everything we need to do was already covered in training and we’ve clearly learned none of it.

The answer is, as you’ve guessed, it’s an escape room, fiddly dependencies pushing you to seek out square one forms the throughline. Once you’ve opened the door, the rest is shrugged: “You make your way out of the door, and find your crewmates in tight concentration on the command deck. You work out a plan and manage to preserve the vessel and your lives.” The room itself, then, fine. There’s some reasonable text adventury finicking, and I generally enjoy the genre of patiently simulate a diegetic skill. The issue that shortfuses this fun is blurriness, a vague sense of uncontact with each system you manipulate. Interactions can struggle with the daunting of their implementation, as when you need to search through training logs, but the desk with the training logs awkwardly rebuffs you: “The papers from the desk seem to be notes from various training exercises. You arrange them neatly on the desk so you can read them if you want to, but they seem meaty, so you’d prefer knowing whether any of them are relevant before you read them.” You already have to know which ones you want to read, which you find out by reading all of them one by one in the logbook to find out which ones you want to read, which causes them somehow to show up in the desk, which you can’t search, but you can just read? Similarly, at several points you pull up a help screen on the smaller screen you need to disambiguate from the monitor, which awkwardly mutters that you can’t read the help screen on the help screen, “the best way to read this help file is as a printed book, not on screen”, so instead you need to bring it up on the screen after which you can read the help, except when you get the right help screen, which isn’t the help screen page mentioned in the training notes but is a page that is mentioned in the training notes you type into the help screen, which is read straight off the help screen text.

As you’ve probably guessed, the answer to these issues is “Lockout is the first parser game released by the author, and as such may contain all kinds of quirks and odd bits.” Let’s instead then celebrate the author’s promise! Underthrumming Lockout is genuine interest in intertwining die Mensch-Maschine in procedure, the way in which our exertions to torque mechanisms exert us into the mechanizing logic, as ever more exacting you learn your response role are you extended through this ingineering resonates the beauty of the emerging capability you radioperate, which emerges as a playerfriendliness in the metalayer as the parser extends conditionalities to symphony the elegant consistencies you input output mediate, infusing the interaction not with mystic extravagance but a grounded realism of trial and error, confusion and learning, which, after some trial and error, we can hope our beloved parser catalyzes.

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp. I beta tested the game).

You don’t see as many one-room parser games as you used to. It’d be rank speculation to consider the reasons for this given that even asserting the claim should make a big fat [citation needed] pop up, but I’ve never let that stop me: maybe it’s because there are other more enticingly-minimalist constraints, like sub-1,000 word limits or speed IF, that have come into vogue because they actually impose, well, constraints, while a single room can contain just about the whole world? Or maybe it’s because the IF community as a whole is still working off the Cragne Manor afterglow, inasmuch as it’s basically just 80-odd (and 80 odd) single-room games stapled together? Regardless, I find it’s a rare treat to come across a nicely-polished example of the form these days; it’s satisfying to work through a complex yet neatly cabined series of challenges, like peeling a hard-boiled egg just so.

It’s exactly this satisfaction Lockout offers up. As the title indicates, an emergency lockdown has trapped the player character in a ship’s engine room, and you’ve got to figure out how to work the various mechanisms at your disposal to get out. While the setting is never fully specified – the game does a good job of leaving implications to the player to figure out, rather than bogging things down with exposition – this is no excuse for twiddling around with wacky contraptions: if the model here isn’t a modern, real-world ship, the difference is lost on me. As a result, the puzzles are very grounded, hitting a nice mix of physical manipulation and device- and computer-based challenges without requiring leaps of logic (though there are a couple that do take some chewing on, I think they all play fair).

One potential downfall of the one-room game is overwhelming the player with information, since the object density required to support even a short game like this one is much higher than the parser average. Lockout does well on this score, first by keeping the extraneous scenery to a minimum and not unduly extending the puzzle chain past the point of annoyance, but also by keeping certain objects off-limits until earlier challenges have been resolved, creating a solid sense of progression while also managing the player’s attention. Similarly, while there’s a robustly-implemented computer and quite a lot of control panels, Lockout bottom-lines the info you’ll need and redirects unmotivated flailing to keep you on track. Here’s what you get from examining a complicated series of readouts, for example:

"The gauge you instinctively look at first shows the reactor temperature is in the safe region. The second gauge you look at shows the hull pressure differential in the red."

As that excerpt suggests, the prose here is dry, technical, and understated; it fits the techno-thriller vibe and conjures up a sense of place, but it has to be admitted that it’s not very exciting. If compelling writing is one of the main pleasures you get from IF, Lockout might not be your jam, but if you’re in the market for a one-stop-shopping puzzler, this assured debut has you covered.