Lockout

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.