Lockout

(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.