Finding Martin

Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.

And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!

This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.

In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.

Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.

Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.

As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.

However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt

This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.

However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.

One day, completely out of the blue, you get a phone call from Rachel Kessler, the sister of your old university room-mate, Martin. He's gone missing, and she needs someone to find him. Preferably someone weird, which is why she called you. Because Martin and his family are very unusual people - inventors, scientists and dreamers - and it takes an unusual person to get inside his mind, and find out where he has gone. On your journey, you travel to the other side of the world, to outer space, to the past, and to the future, aided by hints from the myriad pop culture references that Wennstrom has scattered throughout her game.

What attracts me to big games like this is not only brainteasing, satisfying puzzles, but also a meaningful, complex storyline. Finding Martin has both - but this is a hard act to pull off. Most people's lives do not involve solving puzzles in order to do basic things. So in order to make the story convincing, you have to be able to justify why these obstacles exist in the context of the story and its characters, rather than just for the sake of having puzzles for the player to solve. In the case of Finding Martin, the puzzles are justified by the fact that Martin and his father are eccentric inventors, people who, instead of having a door like normal people, would open a room using (Spoiler - click to show)a bust of Beethoven with responsive features. More and more of the house, and the map in general, opens up as you figure out how the Kessler family home works.

In the earlier part of the game, we only once or twice get a hint of how the player character feels about Martin - his work identity card doesn't really look like the happy young man you remember, and the closet is as messy as you'd expect. It would be good to have some flashbacks which shed light on your own relationship with him. But as the game develops, some very long narrative portions start to put together who Martin is, and who his friends and family members are. There is a long backstory about Martin's childhood, the death of his father, and what exactly he was working on; and as you progress, not only do you learn parts of this story and about the relationships between the characters, you also get to involve yourself in them as well. The scene in the (Spoiler - click to show)Sweet transformation is particularly well-written, as you can move to different parts of the scene and watch different groups of characters interact.

This is a nicely non-linear game. The map becomes increasingly larger as you go on, and there are often several lines of enquiry open to you at once. This means that you have more than one thing to work on when you get stuck, although sometimes it's not apparent which are dead ends and which puzzles can be solved right now. There are a few hint systems, and the narrative voice sometimes spells things out that would not otherwise be obvious, such as suggesting that (Spoiler - click to show)a pocket watch belongs in a pocket. I would have been lost without the walkthrough, but the game was engaging enough for me to keep persevering with it, and it was always a great pleasure when I managed to solve a difficult puzzle by myself.

Overall, Finding Martin is staggeringly well-implemented, nearly every part working perfectly like clockwork. The (Spoiler - click to show)time travel trips, particular the Sour transformations, work particularly beautifully, although I never really got the hang of (Spoiler - click to show)the fuzzy cube, which not only seemed to have entirely arbitrary workings, but sometimes wouldn't behave the same way twice even under identical circumstances, and (Spoiler - click to show)the dream at the very end, where I found myself needing to go back to an earlier save file because for some reason the correct actions didn't work.

How do you approach this game? With patience, a sense of humour, and a willingness to try things. Start off by examining, looking in, looking under, and looking behind everything you can see. Once you've found the (Spoiler - click to show)watch and have figured out what it can do, it's worth taking some time to explore every single possible setting and copy and paste into a document every response that you get from it. Yes, that will take a long time. You're in this for the long haul, but the early work will pay off. Much of what you discover will be a hint for solving a puzzle, whether immediately or later on. And enjoy the ride. Take some time to read those long cut-scenes (and, again, save copies), get to know the various characters, keep your eyes open for clues, and start piecing together the story. Because that's when the game becomes something more than just a series of amusing puzzles to be solved, but instead the story of a young man suffering the loss of an eccentric but beloved father.

A big review for a big game.

Finding Martin is an extremely big and extremely difficult game. I would not have been able to finish it without external hints and peeking at the walkthrough.
However, it’s also a very long, complicated and well-conceived story that ties together the lives and fates of many characters. It was a great experience to see this play out over the course of many playsessions.

The intro is somewhat hurried. It pays little attention to character exposition or context, instead just telling you the bare minimum of information. A former college mate, Martin, has disappeared. His sister calls you up and persuades you to help find him. That’s it. No big emotional reminders of what close friends you were or what splendid memories you share.
In fact, this detachement in the beginning of the game is one of the first points of criticism in Adam Cadre’s and Janice Eisen’s podcast about Finding Martin. And I have to agree with them… to a point. Were one to come to Finding Martin empty-slated as it were, it would be very hard to muster the determination to wade through that much pointless puzzles without any in-game motivation. Having read reviews and forum-posts about the game though, as I expect almost any player attempting it now would do, I anticipated this. I was prepared and actually looking forward to these puzzles-for-puzzles’-sake.
And I have to say, it is very much worth it when the story starts unfolding to have bit your teeth hard into these unmotivated puzzles. They turn out to have meaning after all.

Technically, Finding Martin is a monster-achievement. The room descriptions follow the many and varied changes in game-state almost seamlessly. There are some points where a repeated description of a device in motion hints at the cogwheels of the game straining ((Spoiler - click to show)the Fuzzy Room in action), but I believe eliminating this would have been very difficult to program.
There is another point of criticism I’d like to bring up: the huge amount of micro-management. There are a few puzzles where you have to sit in front of a desk or a piano and where you have to explicitly SIT and STAND UP every time. There is also the main puzzle/clue mechanism of the game that requires you PUT X IN POCKET every time. Well, okay, I guess… But then you put on a jacket and get disambiguation prompts the whole time. (“The trouser pocket or the jacket pocket?”.) Maybe there could have been a designated pocket for this object? I’m sure I could have shaven a few hundred moves off the +5OOO I took to finish the game.
Ah well, technicalities…

The map is actually not so big. There is Martin’s house, which comprises the main game-area. This area contains a number of hidden passages that expand the map, but not by that much. Then there are quite a number of small submaps to journey to that are easily explored. Together they give a feeling of possibility, of a wider space than is actually in the game.

Part One
You begin by exploring Martin’s house. I got the impression that a mad genius had been in charge of installing the domotics technology and went all out. “Hmmm, what if I tied opening the oven to the turtle drawing its head into its shell?” (Not a real example, but close enough.)
There are hidden or unknown mechanisms and controls everywhere. An enormous number of the objects you come across come with a puzzle. This amount of puzzles also means that by the time you’ve gone through the house once, you’ve been bombarded with a veritable barrage of clues. Very hard to keep track of.

Luckily, there are some things to help the player. For one, the writing. It is clear, descriptive and detailed, with just enough flair as to not become dry.
Then, there are two in-game hint/clue systems. Unfortunately, one of them (the one that tells you how to do things) takes some intricate puzzle-solving all by itself to activate. The other one tells you what to look for next. It hangs just outside the front door.

By meticulously following these clues and experimenting with everything, the player finds more and more ways to open doors and make seemingly trivial things happen ((Spoiler - click to show)running a bath for instance…). This gradually shrinks down the pile of clues to a more manageable size, making it easier to plan ahead.
Also, I found that after a while, my brain adapted to the bizarre-yet-consistent logic of the game. I came to expect certain kinds of solutions to work.

Part Two
In the second part you find a device for travelling that is reminiscent of a certain doctor’s means of transportation. This allows you to leave the house and pick up objects necessary for solving puzzles in the house (by solving more puzzles of course).
During these travels, the backstory finally starts opening up. By listening to old cassettes and through the cunning use of your sense of smell, you learn more about Martin and his family. In the rest of the game you will get to see how their lives and yours entwine to make a possible future.

You also meet the first people. NPCs in Finding Martin are very unresponsive. But they do have a lot to say and do without you having to ask them to. In a bunch of pleasant cut-scenes you will meet half a dozen or so people that will aid you on your quest. They also provide welcome paragraphs of rest and exposition to ease your by-now-overheating brain.

The puzzles in this part are easier, most of all because you have clearer sub-goals and a clearer course of action. This is also a part where you get to experiment and train with the training wheels still on. You are gently prohibited from going on a trip if you don’t have a necessary object. Not so in the last part of the game!

And last but not least, you get to re-explore your surroundings with a cool new gadget! It will change the way you view the world.

Part Three
And now we come to the third part. A long, dense and insanely difficult buildup to the finale.

Through a series of time-travel trips you have to resolve a number of paradoxes in the desired timeline to make it reality. You will need to coöperate with your past self to set up the necessary conditions for the following time trips, plant objects for your future self to solve puzzles and eventually make the intended future a reality instead of a mere possibility.

Finding Martin’s world and logic are bizarre, unintuitive and twisted. However, there is a strong consistency throughout the game. An unseen interlocking machinery is at work underneath the surface and gives the piece its coherence in tone and style. There is method to the madness, it’s just nigh impossible to grasp it.
Therefore I was disappointed to see the coherence crumble in this part as the game descended into gratuitous zaniness (Spoiler - click to show)(Peter Pan and Captain Hook show up…
It’s only one scene during one overseas trip, but it did break the atmosphere for me.

But soon the game shook off this temporary lapse and continued to a truly satisfying finale. It was a joy to see all those carefully laid out pieces come together, tying together timelines as well as the lives of the characters I had come to care about. The road was long and hard, but the reward is very much worth it.

Highly recommended game!