Awakened Deeply

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.

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.