Awakened Deeply

It’s been more than twenty years since my very first IF Comp – it was 2002, I was just out of college, and characteristically I played and reviewed all the games though that was a lot easier when there were fewer than 40 games and I didn’t have a kid. A couple days ago I was trying to explain how the Comp was different back then, and beyond the rules changes and the rise of choice games, I found myself struggling to communicate that beyond the classics people still go back and play, even the parser puzzle games just had a different vibe, were riffing on different things, than the ones you see now. Well, I wish I’d waited a bit to have that conversation, because it would have been easier to just point to Awakened Deeply, as accurate a time capsule from the early-aughts IF scene as you could imagine.

So yeah, this is a game where you wake from cryosleep to find that your spaceship is in peril; where there are no on-screen NPCs you interact with; where the main gameplay mechanic is getting through locked doors, and the cool stuff the PC does happens automatically in cutscenes; and where there’s absolutely no introductory text setting the scene or suggesting you type ABOUT. To its credit, there are no inventory limits or hunger timers or ways to make the game unwinnable – maybe it’s more progressive than the average 2002 game, now that I think about it – but this is a series of traditional sci-fi puzzles in a traditional sci-fi plot (there’s a small twist – what if the Federation from Star Trek were evil? – but it’s telegraphed so early and heavily I don’t feel bad mentioning it), with competent but slightly clumsy execution meaning that occasionally-evocative descriptions underlining the isolation of space terminate in blunt infodumps like:

"You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here."

(There are a lot of notes in this game – finding hastily-scribbled missives or prematurely-terminated audio diaries that recorded the attack that eliminated all other life on the ship is the game’s main storytelling technique).

Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but I think for all this Awakened Deeply does have some charm. It is an utterly sincere, guileless game whose author’s enthusiasm is visible in every description. Of course one of your dead friends is named Riker, since what’s more fun than a Star Trek reference? Of course there’s a climactic, barely-justified moral dilemma toggling between a good ending and a bad ending. Of course there are gratuitous, trivially-reversable deaths. Of course the map is laid out with four symmetric branches leading off from a main hub. This is basic basic IFing, but put together by someone who sure seems tickled pink at the idea of being able to make something like this, and you know, it makes a difference.

Don’t get me wrong – my memory’s already starting to sand off the details in order to deposit Awakened Deeply into the Big Bin O Space Games I never think about. And there are some implementation weaknesses (using a keycard to unlock a door was a bit awkward, I suspect partially due to an overreliance on Instead rules) and typos, though nothing too major on either front. One or two puzzles also could be much better clued, at least as to the syntax required (Spoiler - click to show)(X DIRECTION is not a frequently-used command). The limited nature of the game’s ambition is also impossible to ignore – the ABOUT text even explicitly says the author was inspired by Star Trek and Planetfall, and it’s pretty clear the idea is to just make a game that scratches some of those same itches. So I definitely prefer the way we live now, but for all its flaws Awakened Deeply provided an opportunity for me to check in with how things used to be.

Alas, upon starting this game and solving the starting puzzle, I saw the following room description:

> A small room with nothing but your Cryotube in it. You see the release mainframe to your right and the Port door to the west. The mainframe's tacky lights and fixtures blink erratically. Captain Kirk would be proud. The Port Door has a red light above it indicating it is locked.
>
> The vastness of space can be seen from this room. Thousands of stars surround you, planets streaming slowly across the sky go in all different directions.
>
> You can see Port door, Cryotube (empty), Hunting Knife and Bloody Note here.

This says a few things to me. One, that this game has Star Trek references and an enthusiastic author who loves space (good); two, that I'm in a class science fiction spaceship game (could be good or bad); and three, that the author is fairly new to Inform and its rules about capitalization and initial appearance rules (not something that I look forward to).

The rest of the game bears these ideas out. You are awoken from cryosleep to find most of your crew slaughtered. Your goal is to search through the ship to find out what happened and to make sure you live.

The game is pretty grim, lots of blood and bodies. Gameplay isn't too bad, with SEARCH and EXAMINE being pretty useful on multiple occassions. Make sure to type ABOUT to get instructions on one key puzzle!

Overall, I think the game had a neat idea that was hampered a bit by inexperience with Inform 7, and the writing could have had a little more description and detail. For instance an early room says: "Nothing of
interest is here. It looks like any old ship hallway that you’ve seen
millions of times." If that's the case, why include the room at all? Why have a room that even you, the author, don't like writing about?

The nice thing is the game had several fun moments and the author will only get better with Inform over time if they continue to learn, so I would definitely play more games by this author in the future.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It is far too late for me to inaugurate a review sub-series, as I have done in Comps past. But if I were to, “Sleepyheads” seems like a good one for this year. This is another ‘wake in a sci-fi setting, figure out what’s happened’ joint. This one owes a bit more to Star Trek than Fallout, at least in references. The narrative is a bit more dire than anything Trek went after though. Like maybe Star Trek by Alan Moore.

“CPT Rorschach’s Log, USS GrimDark, Stardate circa 1983. Bodies orbiting ship’s gravity field, their sins and weaknesses swelling to burst into the cold void. Screams swallowed by the endless Dark of space. Dark as it gets. Flushed from airlocks like so much moral waste. Someone, somewhere has their hand on the flusher.”

There are quite a few contradictions built into its setup, implementation and tone. For one, there is an early insta-death that establishes stakes that aren’t really matched by the rest of the game, and does it with the old ‘player doesn’t know what character damn well should know’ trope. (Also, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN HAVE THAT LEVER???) For another, its implementation is gappy - many missing nouns and verbs. At several points, it is unclear whether the game is complaining about verb syntax or unimplemented nouns, which is a real barrier to making progress. You can JUMP on things, but not CLIMB on them, and so on. The tone bounces back and forth between low key atrocity and candy-colored Starfleet uniforms. Sometimes a tone war can produce some very affectingly contrasting moments, but here those moments are kind of firewalled from each other in time, more bouncing around than synthesizing into anything.

The gameplay is pretty standard parser - find/explore/use type of puzzles. They are a mixed bag of integration: some fairly well integrated as these things go, others kind of defying the reality of the setup. I needed the walkthrough a few times, more often to figure out how to accomplish what I wanted, but occasionally (for example the ‘shelf’ puzzle) to figure out a moon logic construct.

The story ends up being a low pressure ‘space corporation conspiracy’ with some adversaries mentioned but only really impacting your puzzle solving once. I couldn’t find a sparky hook among these pieces - the story felt familiar, the implementation fought me more often than not, and its tone never really coalesced. There is a choice to make at the ending, one outcome of which is WAY out of proportion to the actions you took during the game. I never got past a Mechanical engagement with this one.

“You don’t get it. I’m not trapped in here with you. You are trapped in here with me AND THESE TRIBBLES.”
– CPT Rorscahch’s Log, USS GrimDark

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 1hr, both endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless