Race Against Time

This is an ADRIFT game, which I played by downloading the ADRIFT 5 Runner (There are like 3 versions you can download, and google flagged 2 of them as viruses but the third was fine).

This game has a cinematic opening and first few areas. An international space laboratory has been able to cure numerous diseases, but a test virus got out and infected everyone on board! You are chosen to try to clear the contamination (which threatens to infect earth due to an automated shipment) or to die trying.

The initial exploration of the ship was suitably mysterious. After a time, I began to get stuck pretty early on. I consulted the hints, and would a few more times, and found that careful examination of everything was usually the key.

However, a few times I missed some puzzles I don't think I would have gotten because the game gave some negative feedback early on. For instance, I knew that many ADRIFT games have puzzles where you have to (Spoiler - click to show)X something, LOOK UNDER it, SEARCH it, or LOOK BEHIND it, so I spent the first twenty minutes of the game trying all of those things and (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER IT consistently said I can't do that or there's nothing there. It turns out that very late on in a timed sequence you have to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK UNDER (or have already done so) to a scenery item. It just doesn't make much sense to me to have an action that the whole game has told me to be useless (and I was only trying anyway because of past ADRIFT experience) turn out to be super important in the end.

The story was pretty fun, especially the beginning and ending, but I was a little disappointed in the middle. The space station inhabitants are Chinese, and two rooms have Chinese names on them, but one was just Mao Zedong and the other was a title like 'fellow Scientist'; I was looking forward to some thoughtfully chosen bespoke Chinese names, but maybe that was just a weird expectation.

The best part to me was the initial exploration.

Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)Dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not at all good at the hard-as-nails old-school throwback adventures that seem to be the predominant offerings of the current ADRIFT scene, and while I respect that different folks enjoy different strokes the vibe is generally too masochistic for me to enjoy. But then every once in a while, I’ll be playing a game like Race Against Time and think to LOOK UNDER a piece of furniture only to find that there is a hidden keycard down there and I’ll feel a little reward-jolt, and I kind of get it: a view of the pleasures that could be mine if I were king of the pixelbitchers.

I’m not, of course, and it didn’t take me too long to get out of my depth, but the game is agreeable enough about offering hints and keeping things zippy. The plot is standard text-adventure stuff: there’s a deadly plague loose on a space station, and only you are a bad enough dude to plumb its charnel halls and set off the self-destruct mechanism. There aren’t any twists or living characters on offer, so it’s strictly a medium-dry-goods affair, with a classic set of numeric keypads, powered-down elevators, locked chests, and broken mechanisms standing between you and victory. The map is relatively contained and straightforward to navigate, and the threatening atmosphere is established through efficient prose and a minimum of unnecessary detail, which helps keep things focused on the puzzles – because you’ll have to EXAMINE, SEARCH, and as mentioned, LOOK UNDER every implemented object to make sure you’ve got what you need to progress (the game politely informs you of this fact, at least).

Most of the game’s obstacles are pleasingly organic – by which I mean they seem like natural consequences of the situation, like a mechanism being bent by a scientist’s death throes, though there is a door blocked by a crush of bodies, now that I think about it. A few do feel excessively gamey, though, most notably . But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed. But this is part of the draw for people who like hard puzzles, I think – thinking “what would make sense in this world” will get you started on most of them, but the target audience probably thinks it’s an advantage to have a few challenges where you need to think creatively about your inventory without being too fussed about narrative plausibility. All told I got through about the first half of the game while using only a few hints, but had regular recourse to the walkthrough after that, which feels reasonable for the genre.

The implementation is likewise a mixed bag; I didn’t run into any bugs, but there are some nice conveniences, like a type-in-the-date puzzle that allows you to use either US or European date/month conventions. But while it’s nice that there’s a simple UNLOCK command, I only realized that would work after spending five minutes trying and failing to type stuff like SWIPE GREEN FOB KEY ON EASTERN FOB READER in a way the parser would understand, stuck in disambiguation hell.

I’m ending this review with a conventional copout that I really hate: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that you’d like. Race Against Time is too challenging, requires too much unmotivated trial and error, and offers too little to players other than pure puzzle-solving gameplay to recommend to people outside its target audience. But it is sufficiently well put together to give a lay player a sense of the appeal of this style of game, I think, which is not always guaranteed.