DOL-OS

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

Sometime in the 4th millenium, you uncover an ancient computer. Buried in its databases, underneath layers of password-protection, is the account of a chilling juridical/moral experiment.

DOL-OS falls into the genre of games where you investigate and hack your way into the deeper security-layers of a computer-system. It does this in a very engaging way, with a creative take on the genre.

First off, the user interface is extremely well-polished. The program boots up slowly (but not annoyingly so), there are loading bars, the colour scheme suggests a retro-futuristic aesthetic. Some files are corrupted, the letters shifting and blinking ever so slightly to make the text harder to read, thus adding to the sense of investigation and decryption.

The immersiveness of the UI coerces the player to let herself be cast as the PC in the encompassing narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Babel, where you roam a scientific base to uncover the intruiging backstory. DOL-OS has a similar narrative end-goal, but it eliminates the intermediary player character and incorporates the player directly into the narrative.

Of course, regardless of the aesthetics of the UI, the most important thing is the substance of the story being unraveled underneath.

The general story of DOL-OS is not that original. It takes well-known SF tropes as its basic elements. It does however take an intersting and original viewpoint toward the usual conventions of this type of story.
Rather than explicitly point out the adverse effects on humanity of the experiment, this game lets the player draw her own conclusions. Instead, DOL-OS heavily focuses on the personal impact of being part of such a scientific endeavour. Through journals and expert reports, the personality and history of the characters are uncovered piecemeal.
One character in particular, Théophile, shines through as the tragic protagonist in this slowly emerging drama. The player gets tantalizing glimpses of his life-history, his relation to his family, his weaknesses…

Progress through the game is gated through a number of password-protected transitions deeper into the database. Especially the first puzzle is brilliant. It takes careful attention to detail and an associative leap across several documents to construct the first password from the scattered clues.
After that, the gateways are less strongly protected, serving primarily as pacing mechanisms.

DOL-OS succeeds admirably in casting the player as a technological/archeological investigator from the far future. It conjures up a world of morally ambiguous advances and of potentially chilling consequences that seem to lie perhaps only the metaphorical five minutes into the future from our present point of view.

Engaging, thought-provoking, tense,… A very strong piece of IF.

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This is a long game in the 2023 French IF Comp, and one with an innovative take on interactivity and on the themes of 'treason' and 'archives'.

My opinion of the game changed around a lot because there are so many types of interactivity. Basically, you have access to a machine depicted as green-on-black, and you can dig through folders of files and applications.

I was in big trouble at first because my French is mediocre and there are parts of the game that are just reading page after page of fairly complex and technical French.

But then I realized that this is just a big game. Interspersed with the documents are images, codes, and minigames. They were well-done and all worked perfectly (except sudoku, which always quit when I put a 1 in).

The story really developed. At first I had no idea at all what was going on, some kind of obscure tale of political protest and treason, but then it became more of a work diary and finally unfolded into a pretty cool ending.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the outcome. It reminded me a bit of Kafka at parts, in a good way, but ended with its own style. Very fun, one of the better games I've played this year over all.

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DOL-OS is less a choice-based game and more a hypertext exploration game—or more specifically, a “found document” game, with the documents consisting of computer programs, web browser history, images, music, text files, log entries, etc. Being given this trove to explore was compelling, even as at first I was very confused about what all the things I was reading/seeing had to do with each other.

The lovely UI does a lot to create immersion—it’s a great faux computer interface, complete with a green CRT emulation, a variety of icons, and different looks for different programs. The pacing is handled well, with puzzles gating the content you’re meant to see later, meaning the tension slowly escalates as you learn more specifics about who this computer belonged to and what they were working on. There’s one point at which it’s clear you’re getting to the meat of the game, and pieces of what you’ve seen earlier start connecting, until finally you have the full story—and the full horror of it. And there’s still one more twist after that…

(Spoiler - click to show)The moment where you realize that the AI is still present, and you can interact with it, was a great one—perfectly chilling after all you now know. The conversation with it was a little bit of a let down to me, though. Here you get a list of questions you can ask, which you can lawnmower through---picking one doesn't lock you out of any others. However, some of those options lead to sub-menus of questions, and typically you can only ask one of those before you’re shunted back to the main menu. I didn’t see any in-game reason for this, and would have liked to be able to ask all the sub-questions. There’s also, as wolfbiter's review points out, the fact that you don’t get to pick every piece of dialogue from the PC—some back-and-forth happens without your input, which was a little jarring because up until that point, there hadn't really *been* a PC, just me, the player. (Spoiler - click to show)Also, when given the choice at the end, I didn’t see any reason why I’d want to save the program—the game certainly gave me no evidence it was at all a good thing!

I liked that most of the links are keybound—i.e., there’s a little number next to each, showing that you can press that number on the keyboard to open that link. But there were a few hiccups with this system; not every clickable option on each screen is keybound, on one screen there’s a “10” option instead of a 0, and some parts of the game simply can’t be played via the keyboard. I also discovered only after completing the game that there are in-game hints accessible only from the keybinding menu—not sure if I missed something at the beginning indicating they were there? Finally, I don’t want to be a dick about translated games, but the text could use a final proofreading pass to clean up typos and errant phrasing.

Despite my quibbles, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game; it was fun to progress, solving the small puzzles to unlock more text and finally learn the answer to the mystery. (Spoiler - click to show)And a game about the perils of trusting in AI too much feels very timely…

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