9 | FOCAL SHIFT
9 | FOCAL SHIFT
by: Fred Snyder
Progress:
- I made it about 2/3rds of the way through the game, until at around 55 minutes, I completely bricked my playthrough. A command I entered caused the game itself to crash during the “hack stratego” minigame, and the crash removed my ability to enter any more commands. After this event, I paused the timer and took a break so that I would be able to focus and quickly get back to where I trainwrecked myself. I caught back up pretty fast and was able to complete the game in a very satisfying feeling by around 1h25m total across both attempts.
Things I Appreciated:
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I really enjoyed the commitment to the cyberpunk/hacking theme. There wasn’t a ton of description overall, but the description that was there was very clear and effective in invoking the mood of the setting. The use of computer terminology was at an appropriate level for me where I felt slightly challenged by it but not completely lost. I also thought that the main character was unobtrusive but still had a clear sense of personality in some of their responses to situations.
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I liked the logical layout of the map and the limited scope. There were just enough rooms that it felt like there was a building to explore, without overwhelming me with too many places I had to navigate to and keep track of. The navigation was very intuitive and easy to engage with.
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While the next section is going to detail my struggles with parser gameplay, I just want to emphasize that I thought the minigames themselves were pretty fun once I got them to work. My favorite minigame was the last one, which involves placing the tokens while evading a sentry. I don’t think I mastered the minigame, rather I think I just got amazing RNG on the winning attempt. The reason this minigame was satisfying for me is that it felt like a higher-stakes escalation of the games before it. This game aligned the mechanical element of a challenging minigame with the climax of the plot, so it felt like you really had to persevere and earn that good ending (even though I was allowed to try over and over again, it still felt exciting and high stakes to me).
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Because I had such a struggle with elements of this game, I felt very satisfied to actually complete it. It made me feel good that I didn’t give up and that having learned from my mistakes, I got through to the end.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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During my first playthrough, I hit essentially three snag points, so I thought I would detail each one in order as the most efficient way to communicate how cursed my parser gameplay ended up being.
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Snag Point #1: At the beginning of the game I was exploring the rooms and talking to people to gather information. After doing this for a while I realized that I needed to find a key fob somewhere. However, I never organically found this because in the appropriate room, I didn’t think to “examine workstation”. I examined the employee, drone, and the “deck”, and after being told the deck was normal I concluded that there was nothing else I could do here. I do think this one was my fault for not picking up on the cue that “workstation” was the noun I needed to interact with. But this resulted in me wandering around the entire building a bunch more times not being able to make progress because this was such a critical step.
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Snag Point #2: The next area that created an issue for me was the first hacking minigame. I was attempting to hack the surveillance drone, and was presented with what I thought was a Wordle/Mastermind-ish puzzle, and I had 24 attempts, so I was like okay, I just need to systematically solve this. The first time my guess was “HOVERS” which resulted in ++++++ as the feedback. I was like, ok, wow, that must be really bad luck that none of the letters are in the word. I decided to just fish for letters by guessing “ABCDFG” next. I got ++++++ again. Then I realized, oh, I just assumed it was a word puzzle, how silly, so I tried “123456” and got ++++++. I tried “7890QX” and got ++++++. At this point I thought, okay, no matter what I type in, it’s giving the exact same result, so maybe the lesson here is that brute forcing the solution is wrongheaded. Maybe the game is training me to think like a cyberattacker, and I thought back to cybersecurity training modules I did IRL and was like, oh yeah, those videos emphasize that social engineering attacks can be effective. I should be talking to people trying to trick them into accidentally revealing passwords or granting access to me. I did more rounds of the building but didn’t have any luck talking to people more. I tried hacking a car and continued to get ++++++ for “MONEYS” (lol) “123456” and “#$%^&*” (I decided to check symbols just in case). At this point, I decided I was stuck and looked at the walkthrough, which explained the rules of the minigame and how you could get + or - depending on which direction up or down the alphabet. I was like, that makes sense, I guess I just had somehow cosmically horrible RNG and just happened to get only + signs making the puzzle seem impossible. Confident that I knew how to do the puzzle, I tried again, only to get ++++++ no matter what I put in. I was truly stumped by this, thinking I had missed some crucial step in the game to enable the hacking minigame to show minus signs, so I wandered around talking to people again. Finally, I looked at the walkthrough yet again and had the aha moment—the minigame only accepts lowercase letters. Somehow, that was the only type of symbol that never occurred to me to enter. I attribute this to being used to Wordle, where the letters in the puzzle are always uppercase, so I’m used to solving word puzzles in uppercase only. So anyway, my recommendation would be to either code the game to accept uppercase letters in this minigame, or indicate to the player to use only lowercase letters.
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Snag Point #3: The stratego server minigame! So the minigame itself is fine once I figured out how to solve it, I enjoyed it. The issue came after my initial attempt didn’t work. So the first thing I did was guess that I should put Token #1 in the slot labeled #1, and so on. When I finished putting in the five tokens, the puzzle wasn’t solved. I realized oh, the tokens represent the position of the numbers, so if the first number is 7, I need to put “token 1” in “slot 7”. I decided it would be most efficient to just reset the minigame by typing “exit,” figuring I would try again and breeze through it. After exiting, I attempted to “hack stratego” and was told, “I recognize ‘hack’ as a verb but don’t know what you mean by ‘stratego.’” I continued typing commands but the game seemed to have forgotten nouns entirely. I tried “exit” and it said, “You don’t see any obvious exits.” What the heck? Where am I? After trying more commands in this surreal void I finally thought ok, let’s just try to leave the room and picked “south,” which resulted in the message “An error occurred in the game driver: undefined method `children’ for nil” along with a massive list of hyperlinks and then the ability to enter commands had been removed. This was the most cursed moment in the playthrough, when I learned that I am so bad at parser games that I somehow bricked the entire playthrough with my incompetence. Weirdly, this didn’t actually ruin my experience because while this was obviously not the intended way to play, since it’s a game about hacking, getting trapped in a hyperspace void that you can’t escape from is actually a plausible event that could’ve happened in-universe. The moral of the story is: I am not cut out for this. I literally could not hack it.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The main lesson I think I learned here is that it must be incredibly challenging to anticipate all the ways that players might mess up your game even when they are trying in good faith to engage with it. Uppercase-letter-gate is a situation where perhaps it would just be assumed that no one would ever default to uppercase for one place in the game when lowercase is used everywhere else, yet, that is what I naturally did. Even more embarrassingly for me, after learning the issue, I still entered uppercase letters a few times automatically and had to actively suppress that impulse. So I think this is a good reminder for me, when creating something, that I need to occasionally check in and make sure I am not so close to my work that I make too many assumptions about how someone new encountering it might misinterpret what the game is telling them.
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Another important lesson I take from this game is how elegant the escalation of game mechanics can be. The minigames progress naturally, building upon what came before and having trained the player how to engage with it. By the time I was in the final minigame, I was typing commands almost automatically, making it feel like I was actually getting better at “hacking”.
Quote
- “If there’s any color in the spectrum that could accurately be called nondescript, it’s the shade of beige that decorates these walls.” (Made me laugh)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The strong feeling of satisfaction when I broke through the final minigame to reach the end, it was a great punctuation to the experience.