Lockdown

Intfiction.org
Delron - "Review Compilation"
I think this is aiming to be a psychological thriller, but it doesn’t have quite enough going on in either department.

On the psychological drama side, this is a story about a mass shooting/suicide, told from the perspective of the shooter. The shooter has serious mental health problems and a great deal of resentment, and uncovering this is a major focus of the game. Most of this doesn’t add much to ‘serious mental health problems and a great deal of resentment’, though. On encountering the dead bodies of his former co-workers, we get a little information about how he didn’t like them.

The media res opening suggests that it might be intended as that venerable old saw of psychological thrillers, the Dreadful Past Conveniently Obscured by Amnesia, but – thankfully – this turns out to just be the effect of the player’s limited knowledge, rather than the protagonist’s.

And on the thriller side, there’s kind of a lack of thrills. You’re fortified inside a base, with The Authorities hammering on the door – that’s a reliable premise for building tension over the course of a story, but beyond its initial introduction, it’s basically ignored. You have an objective at the outset of the story, and advance steadily towards that objective until you accomplish it. That’s OK for gameplay purposes, kinda, but really bad for story.

The story isn’t hugely interested in the SF part either; we never really learn what the science guys are studying or why. The parts you can interact with are all rather pulpy: Big Machine With Buttons, Huge Shiny Crystal – but the overactive enthusiasm and melodrama that I generally take as hallmarks of self-conscious science pulp are absent. The principal reason to situate the action in a science base, rather than in any other workplace, is so that puzzles are required to complete the action.
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