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Review
Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review
Style: Parser
Played: 7/2/26
Playtime: 1hr, finished w/ hints
There’ve been a few works I have reviewed where my take has been some variation of ‘graphically accomplished, but narratively unfocused.’ WWIIEE (wheee!) kind of flips that. As an ADRIFT work, I am unsure how much control the author has over presentation. Based on my experience with WWIIEE, I am assuming the answer is ‘not as much as desired.’ The opening screen hit me with a nearly unreadable block of Cyan words on a white background. This will not be your experience, however, thanks to a crucial bugfix, subsequent to my play through. Maybe ADRIFT'S presentation control is 'just enough to fix bugs!'
The story is a light escape task - you have critical Nazi info, escape to get it to the resistance! It is a short work with only two or three steps. To evade the Nazi guards you must beat them to a roof where a parachute awaits and fly to freedom. This is decidedly a ‘learn from failures’ design, where you will be iterating your escape until you ultimately succeed. If I arbitrarily break it into three steps, the middle step in particular did not give me enough cuing in failures to suss out what was desired. It tried to cue me, I could see that. But it fell a little short of being clear enough how to accomplish it. Yes, in a game this short, I nevertheless needed HINTs.
Despite those reservations, there was in fact a robust HINT system, and barring that one step the remaining 2/3 of the game were much tighter in failure feedback. There is a charge to connecting dots and being rewarded for doing so. (Arguably, a core component of early IF’s appeal!) Given that fifty years on I’m still enjoying IF, CLEARLY I am not immune to that appeal, and it was reasonably delivered here! The brevity of the work made its eye-assaulting palette tolerable, and the robustness of its HINT system ensured I would not be stuck in it. Imagine how much better YOUR experience will be with a reasonable color scheme!
A pleasant diversion, thumbing Nazis in the eye. Yeah, I’ll put up with some squinting to be able to do that. Take that, Hitler!
