Degeneracy

This is an enjoyable short puzzle game with an interesting mechanic, but it doesn't do much to realize its author-declared inspiration.

One can't discuss details without spoilers, so...

(Spoiler - click to show)
Per author Leonard Richardson's post-mortem, the original inspiration of this game took the following form:

"I had a silly idea which I was just about to start experimenting with, when I came up with an even sillier idea: a game which changed its version number as you played it. As I conceived it, you would start at the latest version, and as the version number slid inexorably downwards, objects would disappear, typos would pop up, and previously fixed bugs would come back like Jason back for another try."

The concept is intriguing! However, the author elaborates that: "It took about thirty seconds for me to connect this idea with the 'world in decay' scenario often seen in fantasy games."

I don't personally see the connection, and while I think the plot that Richardson invented for the game is clever and compelling, it doesn't quite jibe with the core mechanic of steadily reducing the version number of the game as it is being played. "Going back in time" in the game universe means something very different than "going back in time" in ours, so the metaphor doesn't really work.

There is certainly room for exploration with respect to themes of disintegrating reality (see Shade, for example, or the works of Philip K. Dick), but the regression of the protagonist's world to bare Inform 6 object implementations doesn't do this. The protagonist has no ability to understand it, and the player's understanding has no bearing on gameplay. The two conceptual schemes just seem totally divorced from one another -- not even books on Logick and Algorisms (or tomes on Conceptes Metaphysickal) in the baron's study to create a tenuous bridge.


Taken on its most basic terms, this is a relatively quick experience that makes for a fun enough bite-sized adventure. I only found one small bug: an issue with looking under an arm-chair that seems to be the result of a backwards condition in the logic that produces the response. A rather large amount of work went into what amounts to an extended Easter egg(Spoiler - click to show), or perhaps in this case an Easter Ham. It's definitely worth playing the game and examining its source code, which the author has graciously supplied.