Pegasus

This is a fairly stripped-down parser game, mostly involving linear conversations and simple tasks where you follow orders. The emotions are on-the-nose, and the descriptions are small.

But I liked the game. For my personal, somewhat cheesy style, this game was a great fit. I've played it a couple of times, and I enjoy the relationship it develops.

In Pegasus you play as a secret agent. The game starts off dramatically, and after that it mostly consists of a series of flashbacks that explain how you ended up in the situation that opens the game. At the very end there's an important choice to be made.

The writing is strong, and the pacing mostly keeps the game moving quickly. I found myself invested in what happens with the PC and his partner Sarah, and I wanted to see how things ended. There are puzzles, but this is a story-focused game, with lots of conversation.

The game also explores Sarah's background and how she ended up as an agent for the Pegasus organization.

I had some trouble with some of the puzzles (especially the first two). The puzzles themselves weren't hard, but I thought they could have been better clued - in the sense that I tried some things that were similar to the correct solutions, but the game's response didn't indicate to me that I was close. There were also more spelling and punctuation errors than I expected given the quality of the writing. I think having a few more testers on the game would have helped with both of these issues.

Story-wise, I think fleshing out a few more things would improve the game, such as more on the background of the PC's partner Sarah. (This is mostly just hinted at, albeit intriguingly.) Also, there were two choices near the end, (Spoiler - click to show)how you respond to the phone call in the office building as well as the major choice at the very end, where the working out of the consequences of these choices could have taken the story in even more interesting directions.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, I enjoyed playing Pegasus. It's a short, tight, well-written thriller.

In Pegasus, we play a commando on a mission gone horribly wrong: you and your team mate are trapped and she will sacrifice herself so you can get out. At that point, the game turns into a series of flashbacks that tell the story of how you got to be in this situation. This is really quite neat: they are tightly choreographed scenes in which you are continually doing non-standard things that move the plot forward at a brisk page. The early scene where your teamwork is tested, for instance, is a great example of how to do something like that in a parser game. Really nice. I seem to recall that The Duel That Spanned the Ages had a bit of a similar feel, although that game was even more about straight action scenes.

The narrative development isn’t quite up to the same standards. The personalities of the two protagonists remain rather vague, as does the nature of the Pegasus organisation. We learn that (Spoiler - click to show)Sarah was pressed into service, but this fact isn’t developed any further. In the end, what it comes down to is that the game is simply too short: I was extremely surprised when the game ended, because it felt like I had just played through the first chapter of what was going to be at least a three chapter story: disaster, investigation, revenge. Instead, we have a sort of moral choice, but we’re not invested enough to give this a real punch.

Should have been significantly longer. That’s a complaint, but also a compliment.