198BREW

It’s such a drag when you run out of your preferred source of caffeine. Especially if you discover it first thing in the morning and then you have to formulate your plan to acquire caffeine while you’re still groggy. It’s even worse if you’ve had a bad night, like if for example you just took over your girlfriend’s body, destroying her consciousness (consensually, sort of) in the process, and you’re trying to adjust to the new body while also processing the loss. And it’s snowing.

I love 198BREW’s weird, dark world (that nevertheless still has Nespresso pods), the evocative descriptions of its bleak setting, and its lightly sketched but intriguing characters (including the late girlfriend, who is very present in the narrative). I also love that this is a time loop game where the PC is not the person in the time loop—the actual time-looper is just so done with the whole thing that he’s looking to delegate the task that will get him out of the loop. The standard version of the time loop trope is evergreen to me, but I do appreciate the freshness of a sideways take on it.

Unfortunately, however, the game is distinctly underimplemented, with the full range of “inexperienced parser author” issues—from lack of synonyms to objects mentioned but not implemented to default responses not changed. (If any game really, really needed to ensure that the response to X ME was not “As good-looking as ever”, it’s this one—and I’m not even the kind of parser player who always types X ME just to see if the author put in a custom response; I only did it because the hints the game was dropping about the PC’s situation suggested to me that the response might be interesting.)

The logic behind the actions I needed to take also didn’t always come together for me. In the art gallery, for example, it didn’t occur to me to (Spoiler - click to show)talk to the painting, in part because the descriptions seemed more focused on the tangibility of other elements of the painting than the liveliness of the central figure. I was otherwise able to follow the logic trail that led me to acquiring change for a pay phone, but when the game then told me that I needed something interesting to say over the phone, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. Because I’d completed everything else there was to do in the game by that point, I essentially solved that puzzle by interacting with the last conspicuous setpiece that hadn’t been relevant yet and then going “Well, I don’t see anything else to interact with, I guess it’s phone time,” but even once all was said and done I wasn’t really sure why (Spoiler - click to show)telling Jacob to eat the crows was more interesting and/or convincing than any other random task the PC could have made up.

So I really liked 198BREW as a work of science fiction, but I liked it somewhat less as a game. Not that I think it would have been better as static fiction—I do think it benefits from its interactivity, and in most cases the underlying structure of the gameplay is fine—I just wish the interactive aspects had been a little better executed. But I’d definitely be interested in future games from this author.