Inside the Facility

This was an odd one. It almost managed to capture my imagination with its sparse descriptions and limited scenery, but there was still something missing. Maybe the vast number of rooms and large amounts of cycling dialogue made it tempting to start skimming and miss out on some of the setting. I think this is a game played for other reasons than immersion.

I played this as my third parser game -- although with just four cardinal directions and two other actions (wait and status) it doesn't strictly need parser input. I really appreciate the way this game streamlines and automates the parser gameplay to the point where almost all actions happen automatically. And it still manages to set up some good puzzles!

I played this on a phone with the auto-map. In hindsight, I think it would have been a better experience with pen-and-paper mapping. With the auto-map, it was easy for someone with my lack of willpower to thrust through to every unexplored room, missing subtle cues and geographical hints along the way.

I definitely think you should play this one, because it extracts one of the cores of parser gameplay while peeling a way a lot of other things. It's a fun puzzle, but perhaps even more interesting as a very well executed abstraction.

This is largely a treasure hunt style game where you must determine where to take your current item, though there are also more complicated puzzles. It takes place in a sci-fi research facility with teleportation rooms and invisibility labs and amusing NPCs.

My only complaint is that the navigation starts to get tedious after a while as the map keeps getting larger. My ideas for dealing with this would be: include a "go to" command; include a graphical interactive map in the game; use a smaller map and reuse the rooms more.

The only commands in this game are moving, looking at the room description, checking your inventory, and waiting. The fact that you can't inspect things more closely or take objects that seem useful can be frustrating when you're used to having more control, but it's somehow funny to passively infiltrate this facility by simply wandering around. I definitely recommend making yourself a map-- something I pretty much never do, but this game practically requires it.

What an absolutely amazing game. I played the entire things - trophy and all - in one sitting. I loved it. It made me laugh, it was clever, and the puzzles were great. What a simple concept executed in a brilliant way.

Described as a 'limited parser game', Inside the Facility gives you just six possible actions - NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, LOOK, and Z (WAIT). My first impression on hearing this was, "So the whole game is just wandering around? That's pretty shallow and restricted gameplay, right?" Wrong. Very wrong.

I spent the next two or so hours enjoying myself so much that all of my initial skepticism was replaced by respect and quite a good deal of affection. I was in my own little world, writing down room names and sketching out travel routes, making notes about keycard colors and puzzle solutions, all the while trying to figure out how to explore deeper and further into the place.

The setting is simple enough - a huge facility full of quirky rooms in which they do SCIENCE! - but there's a lot of character and depth there: the handyman who is too distracted by you to do his job; the hapless security recruits and their exasperated sergeant; a gardener who has mastered the art of strategic avoidance... yes, it's all 'wandering about' but what a wander it is. Clever puzzles and even cleverer humour make all the difference.

You're even explicitly advised to make a map and there's a handy print-out for you to use and everything - and believe me when I tell you that you should definitely do that, else some of the puzzles will be a bit of a nightmare.

Inside the Facility proves that you don't need too much complexity in terms of commands to have satisfying puzzles and a deep interactive experience. Five flasks of hypercalderic Borsch fluid.

I used to play lot of this back in the late 90's and it had somehow fallen off my radar until I found an old "Z" game stored in a forgotten folder and that set me searching for any new games and I came across this. Loved this game - in particular the simplicity of the commands and the map which had me compulsively playing until every last square was filled in. This will definitely appeal to people that like order in their lives (or who are a bit challenged to remember where they they have been and where they are going) as filling in the map and being able to refer back to it to navigate was very satisfying. The puzzles are good, most I got but some I had to glance at the walk through to get a hint where to start. My only negative was that some puzzles seemed like the only way to solve them was random guesses and going around in circles until you struck lucky. The characters you meet along the way are interesting, worth waiting a while in some rooms to see what they will say. I also played "Wand" by the same author - but this was my favorite! ... for now anyway....

Only kidding - completionists will probably love this game, unless they have something important to do and are on a strict deadline. In that case, put this game off until later.

The basic premise is that 130 rooms make up the Facility, and your job is to discover each and every one. At first it seems simple, until you run into the Facility's security clearance system, which only grants you access to new parts of the Facility once you've found a keycard of the corresponding color. From there, the game is a series of fetch quests and minor puzzles, but it's hilarious and cute and the characters, even though you can't interact with them outside of a very limited set of actions, are so endearing.

There's not a lot of story, at least not an overarching one. But about halfway through the game I realized that I didn't need a story, I was just eagerly waiting to fill in the next box on the paper map I was playing along with. (Don't skip out on that part - half the fun is in filling in the squares and eventually gazing down at a fully developed map.)

This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.

This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.

If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.

An interesting juxtaposition: a parser game with a fixed list of simple commands such that it could work fine with a twine interface or even something simpler, but with a focus on mapping and simple puzzles that gives it some of a classic text-adventure feel. Exploring and mapping the big space was fun, the puzzles were well-designed to be interesting without leaving the player lost, and the text, despite being somewhat minimal, had a nice light-hearted feel to it that gave the game a cheery atmosphere. All in all, a lot of fun.

The only commands this game accepts are NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST, WAIT, LOOK and STATUS, with actions like picking things up and giving them to NPCs triggered automatically. This is surprisingly effective, and the game contains a variety of puzzles of different types: lock and key, darkness, bribery, manipulate the NPC, figure out the machine, navigation.

I was initially put off by the request to print off a map to fill in as you go, but found it added to the fun, like solving a crossword, and there are certainly puzzles that would have been both harder and less enjoyable without it.

The author knows how to use brevity of writing to good effect – with such a large map, longer descriptions would have made the game more tiring. But they managed to squeeze every drop of clarity and characterisation out of the one-sentence descriptions. Some characters made me laugh or feel sorry for them, and some I took an instant dislike to.