ConText NightSky

It’s hard to write a true review of ConText NightSky, because the game’s blurb reveals that what’s been submitted falls well short of the author’s expectations. Taking the ambitious course of developing a new parser system, it’s clear that there wasn’t enough time to wrinkle out the bugs, much less create a full game to take advantage of the system. While the setup of mysterious goings-on at an Arctic research base is intriguing, the game stops just as it seems ready to get going – you have a three-item to-do list, but after showering and eating a meal, I wasn’t able to discover how to start the protagonist’s data-analysis work, which was the third item.

I’m pretty sure this is due to the game being incomplete rather than a failure to guess the verb because the system prompts you with all possible actions, and nouns those actions can apply to, each turn, with the possibilities shifting as you type. This is a nice convenience that removes guess-the-verb issues, though I was still often puzzled by why some objects had to be looked at and others examined, for example. What’s worse, I found that performance was awful – while I chuckled when I first noticed the game had an always-on FPS counter, I soon found that the game would grind to a near-halt in certain locations, making it a real burden to play.

With these technical limitations, a truncated story, and nonstop typos, it’s clear that the version of ConText NightSky currently on offer isn’t really worth playing; I get that the author probably felt pressure to submit something by the Comp deadline even if it didn’t fit the initial vision, but in this as in almost every case, the best course would have been to delay releasing the game until it was something the author could be proud of. There are high-profile competitions and festivals every couple of months these days, so waiting a bit costs basically nothing, whereas the chance to make an amazing first impression is a terrible thing to lose.

(I’ll also take this opportunity to plug @mathbrush’s great Twitter thread on custom parsers from a couple weeks back – definitely essential reading material for anyone considering writing one with an eye towards entering an IF competition).