Enlisted

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- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 20, 2022

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

The more games I review, the more importance I place on one particular rule from Graham Nelson's legendary "Players' Bill Of Rights": "Not to have to do boring things for the sake of it." The EVA suit stuff from Enlisted felt quite realistic -- probably, traveling in a space suit via a backpack thruster and positioning system would be just as fiddly and drudging as the game makes it seem. However, reproducing this process does not make for enjoyable interactive fiction... Instead, we have a few minutes of excitement and then long stretches of painful and tricky mucking about. If I wanted that, I'd have joined the real Army.

This is a Star Trek-esque game. After a brief opening sequence with some guess-the-verb stuff, you are woken from cryosleep and have to repair a station.

The station has hallways A through J that are all identical, and minimally described, as well as a variety of other rooms. There are some fun things here, but I found a lot of it frustrating. The centerpiece of the game is a series of several EVA expeditions that realistically model 3d movement without friction. I found this to be tedious.

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Baf's Guide

A Sci-Fi puzzlefest, covering your joining the Space Troopers, your training course, as well as your first mission. Includes a maze with a twist (however, this twist doesn't make it easier to solve). You can choose your gender at the beginning, though your choice barely affects the story or the gameplay. Finally, there are two alternate winning endings, but reaching one of them depends on a somewhat obscure move. The game suffers a bit from insufficient beta-testing; I've rated it **** nevertheless, for a number of its puzzles really are creative.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev