Awakened Deeply

This is a fairly brief and mostly straightforward sci-fi puzzler that’s a bit rough around the edges. There were a decent number of times when the first command I tried wasn’t accepted by the game; fortunately, that was never a problem, as it was easy to figure out the correct command (sometimes thanks to helpful customized error messages). Ideally, though, more synonyms would be implemented, and there’s also the classic “you can’t see any such thing” when examining some mentioned nouns. Interactable nouns, on the other hand, often tend to be capitalized and set off on their own line, e.g. “You see Crate here,” rather than integrated more naturally into the room descriptions. There’s also one puzzle that felt very “read the author’s mind” to me, and I would never have solved it without the walkthrough.

My other main point of critique is that I wasn’t emotionally invested in the story. You, the ship’s captain, regularly come upon the bodies of colleagues who have been wounded or killed, but there’s no emotion in the descriptions of them, and more often than not their only purpose is to provide you with an item or clue you need to progress. For example:

The dead body of, Lieutenant Yostin, lies on the floor. It looks like his left arm has been severed from his body.

>x yostin
He is wearing his dress uniform and dress coat with pockets.

And then you need to "x pockets" (the uniform and coat are not implemented) in order to obtain a plot-necessary item. While clearly the PC knows who this person is, the presence of his dead body elicits no reaction; nothing would be different if he was, say, a desk, with a drawer you had to open and take the item from.

I did enjoy exploring the ship and working my way through the puzzle chain, and the story had me intrigued. I’d just have liked to see more acknowledgement of the horror of what happened on the ship, and thus be made to feel a sense of the stakes, rather than simply being told about them.