45 | TRAFFIC
45 | TRAFFIC
by: D. S. Yu
Progress:
- I reached the end of this game in 50 minutes or so, making extensive use of the walkthrough. Because the walkthrough indicated that there was more to do than I found, I restarted and followed its commands exactly to see parts that I missed. In total, I spent about an hour with this game.
Things I Appreciated:
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I enjoyed the time loop mechanic and how you had to gradually realize through experimentation that you could pick the perspective you were jumping into by making contact (usually visual) with that specific individual. I liked the descriptions of having your form altered, for instance, being forcibly reincarnated as a baby and having to figure out how to do anything in that form.
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I like that the game’s puzzles all revolve around empathy in some way. Ultimately, person-by-person, you are making each character’s day marginally less bad until it improves for everyone collectively. It offers a kind of respite from the “logic” of traffic which can be very self-centered and individualistic. When I started looking at scenes from the perspective of, how can I make this person’s day better, such as the scene on the bus, the solutions became more evident.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I had extensive struggles with guessing what the game expected me to do, and without the walkthrough I doubt I would’ve advanced through just about any of the scenes. In the first scene I unlocked (the metal box scene) I struggled trying to find a way to enter a number into the panel. I had written out the equations in my notes and wanted to test numbers, but there was no command that I could think of that would allow the character to input a number. I was shocked when I read the walkthrough and learned that to proceed, I had to ask my co-worker for an extremely specific object that I had never seen; essentially, I was asked to imagine a screwdriver into existence. Another significant issue I had was that I wasted rounds and rounds in the student driver car not understanding why nothing I did worked (I kept typing commands like: tell young man to drive north) and was similarly surprised to learn from the walkthrough that the syntax expected was “young man, drive north”. Overall, the impression I had without playing is that my expectation of how to navigate the puzzles was significantly out of alignment with the author’s expectations of how to solve them. I am not blameless in this of course, I definitely could have tried more creative things rather than going to the walkthrough so quickly, so I don’t know what things I might have guessed would have been accepted as alternate solutions. But I’ve included my transcript, so you can judge for yourself.
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One very specific recommendation I have is regarding the puzzle involving the student driver and the cab. I found that trying to understand spatially what was happening here based on the description was challenging (the main issue making this puzzle so hard for me was that before understanding what the goal of the puzzle was, I had entered the cab and chosen “pull over” as my first command, since it’s the “correct” thing to do in that situation in real life, so I had a hard time understanding the positioning of the cab from the student driver’s point of view). My recommendation is to generate an ASCII art map representation visualizing the current state of the lanes for those turns, like the art of the control panel, so that the player can more easily see what they are trying to even do here.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I thought this was an interesting implementation of time-based puzzles. You can mess up a scene badly enough to fail it, but because of the loop mechanic, you can just keep trying until you figure it out. Giving the player limited agency per loop helps focus their attention toward solutions by allowing them to rule out anything so elaborate that it would require more than the available turns.
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This is another reminder to be thoughtful about error messages. In the baby scene, one of the commands I tried was “throw pacifier,” which gave me the response “Futile.” Yet not only was throwing the pacifier not futile, it was an intended solution. Had the error message instead prompted me “Throw the pacifier at what?” or something similarly specific, it would have rewarded me for being on the right track and clued me to that solution. Had I not already been reading the walkthrough, seeing “throw pacifier” fail with that default error message would’ve led me to completely abandon that approach.
Quote:
- “Suddenly, the elderly woman decides she can’t take it anymore. She aggressively shoves her way through the crowd until she reaches the back door. Then, with a surprising show of strength, she forces the back doors open. This causes the bus to come to a screeching halt, at which point the passenger hops off the bus and walks off into the street.” (A mood, for sure: eff this shitty bus, I’m out of here!)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- At the beginning of the game when, after exploring the scene for a few turns, my character dies. This was shocking, and an excellent hook that got me more invested (given that the subject matter was traffic, I wasn’t looking forward to playing this one) and curious as to what was happening.
DemonApologist_Traffic.txt (128.6 KB)