12 | AWAKENED DEEPLY
12 | AWAKENED DEEPLY
by: R.A. Cooper
Progress:
- During my first attempt to play the game, I softlocked within 15 minutes trying to exit the cryotube (I wish I was joking, truly, but that’s how much of a disaster I was). That experience was frustrating and I wanted to make sure my emotions didn’t overly impact my impression of the game, so I took a break to do other stuff for a while, then tried again and was able to fully complete the game with a fresh attempt. In total, I played for about 1h15m.
Things I Appreciated:
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The puzzles and solutions to this game all seemed reasonable. I’ll get into the parser issues I had later, but in terms of the concept of how the puzzles are solved, it’s all pretty intuitive.
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I liked the self-contained environment of exploring a spaceship. Given the scope of the puzzles, there were enough rooms that I had to actively keep track of what I was doing, but not so many that it was tedious to re-check areas when I was stuck.
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Because this game takes place entirely within interior/mechanical spaces, I really loved moments where you are reminded of the beauty of space. These were sparing (understandably so since I think in this game genre, putting in too much description risks the player trying to interact with things they aren’t meant to try and use as gameplay elements) but when they came up, they helped renew my determination to get through this.
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Finally, the thing I appreciated the most about the game is that the story elements successfully fostered a sense of paranoia for me. In the front matter, the game promises that you will “uncover the truth, plot, and potential betrayal,” so going in, I was expecting anyone who helped me in the narrative to potentially turn on me. I like when a game gives me an opportunity to try and outsmart its plot, because usually it results in me having unique experiences when my paranoid attempts to “outsmart” it cause me to make mistakes. I don’t think I would make a very effective ship captain. More on that later.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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The parser gameplay created a lot of problems for me. I attribute a lot of this to my inexperience, but I included my transcripts to illustrate that I was really trying in good faith to figure out how to get the things I wanted to happen to happen. One gameplay mistake on my end that I notice in the transcripts that I could improve on in future gameplay is to not repeat verbs that I’ve been told are invalid (for instance, I kept instinctively trying to “use” things even after being told not to).
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First, I’ll discuss the softlock that I caused. (Please refer to the attached transcript: DemonApologist_AwakenedDeeply_FirstAttempt.txt for a list of the commands I entered). Even from the very first command (“examine glow”), I was surprised by the response. My interior monologue was like, “What do you mean I don’t see any such thing? You just told me it was there!” I was able to eventually discover that I was in a cryotube and holding a “release button” (this confused me at first because I read “release” as a verb, as in I should try to release the button). The fatal moment of this run, I believe, was when I checked my inventory and decided to try to “drop release button.” From this point, you can see me try all sorts of commands, until I thought, okay, it’s time to just use the walkthrough so I can actually play this. When I enter the walkthrough commands, it doesn’t work, and I believe it’s because I dropped the release button.
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So, what do I make of this? For my experience level, “feel hand” was an unintuitive first required action. In my mind, “feeling” is what is done with, rather than to, a hand. To try and get at what I mean, I interpret “feel hand” as “feel [my] hand [with the other hand]”. I had a hard time digesting that this command is implicitly saying “feel [the thing that is in my] hand” or perhaps “feel [with my] hand [the thing that is there]” When I went to the help guide to learn the verbs, “feel” wasn’t listed under “Other Common Commands,” so as tedious as it might be to add to your guide, you might want to include even more basic parser commands for complete flops like me trying to play it.
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Once I escaped the cryotube on the 2nd attempt to play the game, I feel like I encountered other parsing issues but they weren’t as disastrous because I didn’t get softlocked. If you go through my transcript (see attached file: DemonApologist_AwakenedDeeply_SecondAttempt.txt) you can see many moments where it’s clear that I’ve solved the puzzle in my head, but haven’t figured out how to express it in a way the game recognizes. The issue I had was really, if I wasn’t able to find the language the game needed fast enough, I would eventually decide that it wasn’t the right answer and try other solutions. For instance, in the placard code puzzle, I thought that the up arrow, down arrow, and blank placard meant that I had to take the previous 3-digit code (364) and assign the highest digit to orange, the middle digit to red, and the lowest digit to green. Had I chosen to “look down” instead of “look under green placard” I would’ve been able to piece this together on my own. Eventually I had to use the walkthrough to get me back on track here. I think it’s fine that I experienced a “red herring” puzzle solution for the record, that’s part of the fun of a puzzle game. I’m just pointing it out to illustrate how when you aren’t confident in your ability to find language the game recognizes, it can lead to ruling out correct solutions, or conversely, the inability to rule out incorrect solutions.
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There was a moment in the writing that I had mixed feelings about, which was when you enter the Engineering Port. The moment you enter the room, before you can give a command, a conflict/fight starts and resolves instantly without any player input where Captain Pitker feigns a heart attack to confuse his assailant. I liked it as a character moment for Captain Pitker to get to solve the moment creatively. But I felt a bit cheated by it due to the lack of interactivity. This is the kind of moment that would be really cool to earn as a player rather than being handed simply by entering a room for the first time.
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As I mentioned (far) above, the game set me up to be paranoid of a betrayal starting with the front matter of the game. As a result, I thoroughly distrusted Smith any time they talked to Pitker, especially because they were claiming to be helping. When I got to the ending, Smith presents you with the choice of escaping the ship, or crashing the ship to blow it up. As a player, all your information to what’s really happening in the outside world is mediated by Smith, so I thought it might be the case that the entire ship state was set up by Smith to trick me into committing essentially a terrorist attack on their behalf. When I chose to leave rather than crashing the ship, I was legitimately surprised that this turned out to be a bad ending (I thought there might be more game, like the escape pod was rigged to explode or something by Smith and I’d have to figure out how to stop it from going off on my own). I was very surprised when the “crash ship” ending was a tonally more celebratory ending. It turned out that the betrayal really was The Authority betraying the ship and there wasn’t a twist second layer of betrayal to it with a Smith double-cross. To wrap this comment up, it’s not necessarily meant as a positive or negative critique. I just thought it might be useful to hear how a paranoid player interpreted the plot and choices available. I thought it was an engaging moment because it surprised me, but I wonder if it surprised me because I played the game with an odd mindset? Like in hindsight I can see that the captain going down with the ship fits in with the narrative better if read through a less paranoid lens. I’m looking forward to reading responses/reviews by other people who played this one just to see if anyone had even a remotely similar experience.
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And in general, because I loved the glimpses of the beauty of space (the moon out the window, the cosmic colors), I would’ve loved to seen a few more descriptive bits like that peppered in.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The number one thing I learned here is that it is very risky from a game design perspective to bottleneck the very first move of a game to be phrased a certain way. I don’t think I would’ve had nearly the same issues if I had even just the tiniest bit of leeway to do another logical phrasing of an action to use the thing I was holding. Starting a player from a moment of significant restriction sets an unforgiving tone for the game, which is at odds with the complexity of the task (which should be trivial for the in-universe character to solve). I just want to remind readers at this moment that, having not even attempted to write a parser game, I respect the hell out of anyone choosing to go for it and how tricky it must be to balance accessibility with having to do what I assume is a lot of headache-inducing coding. This is just a note that I think is something I would take with me if I ever made the attempt to code a game like this, that I need to spend a lot of time carefully setting up the first domino in the gameplay sequence so that it has better odds of going well for many types of players.
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Another game design element that I think is worth significant discussion is the degree to which puzzle elements should be partitioned from each other. Consider my issue with the color code puzzle above: if the color puzzle had 4 colors/digits rather than 3, I would have never even attempted to use the previous 3-digit code while solving it. This has tradeoffs. In the version where both codes are 3 digits, it allows the player to be tricked by a red herring that they might need to reuse the numbers, as happened to me in an interesting way. In the version where the codes use a different number of digits, the player is allowed to discard the already-used code and focus on solving the new puzzle. So the lesson is: as a game designer, I should consider which type of experience I want to encourage by signaling to the player (or not signaling to the player) that they can discard elements of previously solved puzzles.
Quote:
- “You are quite the actor, Captain Pitker.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I opened the storage locker by using a laser pistol to melt through the welding (so cool!) and then immediately a giant pile of corpses poured out (so wildly uncool!).
DemonApologist_AwakenedDeeply_FirstAttempt.txt (3.6 KB)
DemonApologist_AwakenedDeeply_SecondAttempt.txt (57.1 KB)