WITHOUT corporation

I beta-tested this game, but I never got very far. I did complete it this time! (Possibly through exploits).

This is a difficult game to play. It combines in one several features at the start that make it extraordinarily hard to get use to.

1. The online version has no way to scroll back. The game now suggests using a transcript which is good. I downloaded it and made 6 transcripts which I'll upload to the hint thread.
2. Compounding the above, the game frequently prints several pages of text at once and clears the screen.
3. You do not control the main character of the game; instead, they perform random inputs while you observe and help.
4. You cannot WAIT for the main character to do things, since the game will yell at you and disable WAIT. So you have to come up with different actions each turn.
5. The game can randomly crash; I had 4 different crashes on Gargoyle, so saving often is useful.
6. The game still progresses if you save, and at the beginning there are several help menus to navigate that are required to progress that also move the game forward, and
7. The game yells at you if you are too slow and calls you stupid.
8. The game is a surreal game-within-a-game with multiple voices and POVs, and the game-within-the-game is intentionally buggy and underdescribed.

So, the average experience of a new player may very well be trying out different commands, missing chunks of text, having the game yell at you, and being booted out to try again.

If they are able to push past that and continue, they can find some amazing concepts.

The idea of the game is that Max Fog is dead and an AI trained on his consciousness has finished a game based on his notes. Years later, you and an in-game AI have to work together to make the game run for a real-life player. So, you move objects around, queue up routines, etc. in order to get the game running. Meanwhile, the in-game AI is annoyed with how buggy the game is.

More happens, but I'd rather not spoil it. It has much in common with the ending of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

I'm in the game! A neat trick is that whenever the game crashes/reboots you read a review by Me, Mike Russo, or JJMcC, with various scores depending on how well you did running it. I laughed at mine because it was extremely similar to what I'd write, down to a typo in the first paragraph.

The game talks a lot about AI, and is set in a future where AI has caused lasting damage to the earth.

I did find the ending hopeful.

The game is very ambitious, with using Inform menus and keystrokes and regular text to progress, random commands, writing to external files (I think; I never triggered the text that I think does that), and text animations which I've rarely if every seen in Gargoyle. It doesn't 100% pull it off, since it crashed a few times, but it 90% pulls it off, which is great. I did decompile it, which is funny as the fake me in the fake review also decompiled the game (good thinking, future fake me).