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.