My Mind's Mishmash

ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.

The concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.

The video game is about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.

I enjoyed the opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.

Although there are some very good ideas behind this game, it had far too many technical issues for me to continue playing it.

First of all, I was put off by the quality of the writing. I haven't seen any other reviewers bringing this up — and one or two have actually said they thought the prose was good! So maybe my standards are too high, but I felt the writing was stilted, unpolished, and entirely lacking in any kind of style. (I did actually wonder whether it had been written by a precocious child or a very young teenager, but apparently the author is in his mid-twenties.)

Mainly, though, I didn't get very far through because I gave up in disgust when I discovered (from the walkthrough) that something the parser had been refusing to let me interact with — or even look at — was in fact vital to further progress. This wasn't an isolated problem, just the most egregious example. I'm not going to spend time playing a game that I can't trust to be fair with me.