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About the StoryYour friend Mike thinks no one can infiltrate THE FACILITY, but you're going to prove him wrong. Game Details
Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 1, 2016 Current Version: Unknown License: Freeware Development System: Inform Forgiveness Rating: Merciful IFID: 0F60A706-8845-42CD-8264-D476C7F5C98D TUID: stsdri5zh7a4i5my |
Awards
Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle - 2016 XYZZY Awards
13th Place overall; 1st Place, Miss Congeniality Award - 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2016)
46th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2019 edition)
49th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition)
Editorial Reviews
The Breakfast Review
"Inside the Facility" is very much a game rather than a story, a puzzle to be figured out. And it's been pared way down so that the only commands you really need are the four cardinal directions and the ability to wait a turn. On the one hand, this severely limits your ability to interact with the world; on the other hand, this is a game and those are the rules, and it's really more a case of redefining the way the game is played. Not "less", just "different".
See the full review
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating:  Number of Reviews: 9 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews
Clever, funny, unashamed puzzler with reduced parser, November 16, 2016The only commands this game accepts are NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST, WAIT, LOOK and STATUS, with actions like picking things up and giving them to NPCs triggered automatically. This is surprisingly effective, and the game contains a variety of puzzles of different types: lock and key, darkness, bribery, manipulate the NPC, figure out the machine, navigation.
I was initially put off by the request to print off a map to fill in as you go, but found it added to the fun, like solving a crossword, and there are certainly puzzles that would have been both harder and less enjoyable without it.
The author knows how to use brevity of writing to good effect – with such a large map, longer descriptions would have made the game more tiring. But they managed to squeeze every drop of clarity and characterisation out of the one-sentence descriptions. Some characters made me laugh or feel sorry for them, and some I took an instant dislike to.
Completionists, beware!, August 7, 2017Only kidding - completionists will probably love this game, unless they have something important to do and are on a strict deadline. In that case, put this game off until later.
The basic premise is that 130 rooms make up the Facility, and your job is to discover each and every one. At first it seems simple, until you run into the Facility's security clearance system, which only grants you access to new parts of the Facility once you've found a keycard of the corresponding color. From there, the game is a series of fetch quests and minor puzzles, but it's hilarious and cute and the characters, even though you can't interact with them outside of a very limited set of actions, are so endearing.
There's not a lot of story, at least not an overarching one. But about halfway through the game I realized that I didn't need a story, I was just eagerly waiting to fill in the next box on the paper map I was playing along with. (Don't skip out on that part - half the fun is in filling in the squares and eventually gazing down at a fully developed map.)
A great exploration of how far you can go with a limited parser. In a lab., May 10, 2017This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.
This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.
If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.
See All 9 Member Reviews
Inside the Facility on IFDB
Recommended Lists
Inside the Facility appears in the following Recommended Lists:Some of my favorite games by G. Faregan
In alphabetical order.
My new walkthroughs for December 2019 by David Welbourn
On Monday December 30, 2019, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works...
Polls
The following polls include votes for Inside the Facility:Games where you can't screw up by Pinstripe
Sometimes, when I'm playing a game, I spend more time juggling my save files than I do reading the text. I don't want to have to restart because I picked up the green rod instead of the clay jug (with apologies to Zarf). So I'm looking...
For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Best Games of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best Game in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here will...
For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible innovation uses of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best Use of Innovation in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not...
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This is version 18 of this page, edited by dibianca on 12 February 2023 at 11:00pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page