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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!).
13 | ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by: Hubert Janus
Progress:
I took about 18 minutes total to play through this game.
Things I Appreciated:
Going in, my expectation from the front matter was that this was going to be a meme/troll game like Uninteractive Fiction (if so inclined, refer to Response #4 above for more information). I was pleasantly surprised that it was an actual narrative experience.
I was also concerned going in that the crude humor was going to feel unpleasantly aggressive or annoying, but it wasn’t like that all. It was light-hearted and playful more than anything, so I enjoyed my experience overall even though I didn’t expect to. (I guess I should be more charitable with my expectations!)
Despite its straightforward structure and cartoonish conflict, I started to feel some suspense building over the course of the game. Essentially, I wondered, will all endings lead to the exact same end-state, or can it be the case that Rod does escape the punch promised by the title? Put another way, as I was mapping the game out in my head, I wondered whether I was on a “hallway” path with side doors leading to short dead ends, but an ultimate true destination at the end, or if I was on a tree/fractal path where every route of roughly similar length leads to the same result. Believe it or not, this added a sense of stakes to the experience.
The writing style was consistently whimsical and well-crafted, with amusing turns of phrase peppering many of the scenes.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
I gathered from the context of the game that this is a sequel. I think a certain moment in the narrative is probably more impactful if you’ve played the first game, but I honestly don’t feel like it impeded my experience much to not have played that one. But, it would be interesting to see from other reviewers whether or not their experience was enhanced because of their memories of playing the previous entry.
From a mechanical perspective, I noticed one element that I thought could streamline the experience. As a player, when I reached a dead end, I would backtrack to continue playing. However, when I did so, I had to re-click to open all the links in the scene. This isn’t a big deal, but formatting the game such that repeat visits to a previous scene retain the already-revealed text would reduce the attention-clutter for players trying to seamlessly get back on track with the narrative.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The thing I thought about most while playing in this regard is how to use interactive click-links for comedic (or dramatic) timing. As a writer, deciding how much text gets revealed at once, whether it’s a paragraph or two of description or a punchy (ha) quip revealed on its own, is not a neutral choice; it shapes the reading experience significantly, as would the pauses and pacing of a stand-up comedy performance. Similarly, deciding when to have a click link on a non-choice page reveal a new page can be used to set a new scene. What I take away from this is that, if I’m going to take the time to write the type of project that is especially condensed and focused, where every word truly matters, I need to be just as attentive to the timing and flow of how that text appears. I thought the game did this well many times.
Quote:
“‘So I just go in the big sci-fi chamber and hit myself with this Poundland joke gift, and that counts as a good ending?’ asks Rod McSchlong.” (There are many quippy quotes, but this one really sums up the experience best.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
The funniest individual scene was when Rod escapes the parkour-enthusiast sewer critters by siccing their obsessed fans at a convention upon them, it reminded me a lot of the various possum memes that I’ve seen where people semi-ironically stan creatures with a grotesque/vermin reputation. The notion that these random sewer creatures have a passionate enough fanbase to sustain a convention presence is hilarious.
I am incredibly grateful to all reviewers but I believe it’s unwise to comment on specifics during the judging period. So here is a blanket THANK YOU for making the effort to review my game, no matter what you thought of it. You make the IF Comp so much more interesting by being a part of it.
Thanks for reviewing the game. I really appreciate you taking the time to play through it. I actually really appreciate you finding the soft lock issue on the first puzzle because if you hadn’t I wouldn’t have even thought of it. Which to me seems foolish that I didn’t think of it because I myself had I not created it probably would’ve thought to drop the button to potentially hit the button on the floor etc. I’ve uploaded a newer version not allowing you to drop the release button. I didn’t intend anyone to get frustrated by it, but it ended up being a very odd silver lining for me.
The transcript is very helpful for me in the future as I’m learning from your run and others what some more intuitive commands would be for my next game. I agree with you in that some of the commands should be more intuitive. For my next work I plan to make an extensive list of the most intuitive commands from these transcripts and adding them in etc.
I’m glad you liked the atmosphere and the sense of paranoia that I tried to instill.
Again, thanks for the feedback it is very helpful, and for taking the time to play the game. I really appreciate it.
Editor’s note: this is not a response following my standard format, but more of an explanation as to why I am not able to respond to this game at this time. Since I am going based on my personal shuffle order decided by the IF Comp randomizer, I thought it would be weird to just skip from 13 to 15 with no explanation.
14 | THE CURSE
14 | THE CURSE By: Rob
I was really intrigued to play this one based on the front matter. Great cover art, and an interesting blurb. Unfortunately, I was not technically proficient enough to do so.
Since this is presented as an .exe file, I had to teach myself how to run a Windows application on this computer in order to proceed. (I’m someone who is not super technically proficient at this kind of thing, but I’m also stubborn enough to keep trying). This took a lot of attempts and some scurrying around the internet trying to find the best approach to doing this. Or really, any approach that I could get to work.
How it felt at the beginning: I want to execute this file!
How it felt several hours later: oh… I want to execute this file.
But, I was able to open the game late last night, so I decided to call it a day so I could approach the game on its own terms. With a fresh start this morning, I decided to attempt to play the game and was able to get through three screens: the title menu where you pick an option from 1-3, and then I encountered two pop-up screens (with white and red text respectively) describing the intro scenes to the game but could not progress past that point. I restarted to try the “skip intro” option which resulted in the title screen window disappearing, a door opening sound effect playing, and no new window appearing to interact with.
I think the most fair thing for me to do here would be to skip and not vote on this entry. I believe the issue I encountered is almost certainly a result of the software environment of using workarounds to run a file that by all rights shouldn’t have even been runnable by this computer, rather than anything wrong with the actual game. I’m honestly amazed that I even got to see as much of the game as I did given my technical skill level.
For future entries that require me to run .exe files, I will make a similar attempt to at least try to run them just in case I happen to be able to truly play them without encountering this kind of situation. The good news is that given that there are many weeks left to judge, I might have a chance to go back later and try again to play this game. But I don’t want to get stuck and lose momentum in my response process right now as there are so many games left.
I am truly sorry to Rob that I am not able to play and respond meaningfully to the actual content of the game that you crafted at this time.
I was able to play through the game, completing a painting called “Effacement” in around 20 minutes. For reasons I will get into later, I actively chose not to replay this game.
Things I Appreciated:
There’s a lot to love here. The descriptions of my grandmother’s paintings were really evocative and interesting. I thought that there was a good balance between offering paintings that had a wide range of moods, subjects, aesthetics, while still seeming plausible that all these paintings could’ve been done by the same person.
I thought the implementation of sound and music was effective, it breathed life into the choosing process.
The game used choice mechanics in an interesting way. When starting out, unless you actively go out of your way to keep skipping paintings, you might choose to keep something early that, by the end, you might not have kept if you’d known what the range of options was. I thought this was engaging because early on, I didn’t know how many possible paintings I could encounter, the stakes of skipping a painting seem higher because you don’t know if you’ll see it again. This was contrasted by the end, where you are allowed to go back and undo elements of the painting that you are making, which I thought was a subtle and interesting indicator of your agency as a player. After being handed the brush, suddenly, you are more in control of the process. Personally, I chose to undo one of my painting’s choices (I originally chose cool tones but didn’t like the result, so I went back and was allowed to pick the black and white tones that fit the painting I had made better). And finally, the game ends by giving the most agency of all: a text box where you are no longer choosing between pre-determined choices but can simply name your painting what you think it should be called. I love the escalation of that sense of creative control, mirroring what the main character is experiencing as a result of this encounter.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
Early on, (I believe this was the 3rd/4th or 4th/5th paintings that I encountered), I had an immersion-breaking moment where I selected the option to check a new painting, and got the same painting with the same description twice in a row (“The Tear”). This was jarring as it took me a moment to understand what had happened, and it kind of weakened the atmosphere of the game by showing a seam (why would the character re-select the same painting twice in a row so early in the process?). The recommendation I would make is to set the option so that, if you go to a different painting, it is not possible to receive that same painting consecutively.
I find the painting-memory associative exercise interesting. As the games final screen notes, the paintings aren’t necessarily tethered to one specific memory. As I was playing, though, I didn’t know that yet. So I tried to make sense of the connections between the paintings and the memories as I went. Some of them made perfect sense to me, but there was one—the painting “Winter Nor’easter” combined with a memory about being at a playground where I couldn’t make sense of the connections between them. That made me feel like I had missed something important about the painting that would’ve led to this memory, but it also reminded me that associative chains don’t necessarily follow neat, clean lines, so there is a bit of realism to that.
A moment in the text that brought up real emotion for me was the line “At night, when she slept, you could hear the soft whooshing of oxygen.” Unfortunately, I have spent a lot of time around oxygen machines. I had a moment of sudden… anger, I guess? Because I thought, “That’s not what it’s like.” For me, the oxygen machines have been these loud, noisy, oppressive things commanding the spaces that they are in, and I couldn’t imagine thinking of them in a peaceful light as this line suggests. After I had this response, I remembered, well obviously everyone’s experience is different, so why couldn’t it be a “soft whooshing” in certain contexts? I write this mainly to just indicate a moment of rupture in my experience, which I don’t think is a bad thing on its face, but also wasn’t necessarily something that I fully enjoyed either.
As I mentioned at the very beginning of this response, I said that I actively chose not to play the game again, so I want to explain why that is. I think it can be tempting to replay a game like this to see what all the options are and exhaust them, but for me, I think that would inhibit my memory of it. Having already encountered one uncanny moment (the consecutive repeated painting), I felt like it would weaken the experience for me if I was able create a mental map of what all the options actually were and wring the mystique out of the game. I also don’t want to lose the specificity of my experience—I think if I went in to make more choices and generate more paintings, the experience would become indistinct somehow, as if I were sacrificing the particularity of how my organic playthrough I went to have it muddled by future attempts.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
One of the skills proudly on display here is tight visual description. Each painting’s description is only a few sentences, and you are given just enough pieces of the image that it draws something in your mind’s eye. I can easily imagine an alternative where the painting descriptions are overwritten and lose their impact. This was well-balanced writing.
I thought the side panel was employed well to store the key information you had collected, as an alternative to encouraging the player to actually backtrack to previous scenes. This shows that, if you don’t necessarily want players to be able to backtrack a lot, finding alternative ways to allow them to access information they might want to revisit is a great way to do that.
The “consecutive repeated painting” moment reminded me of a thought I had in creating the one IF game that I did for Single Choice Jam. When making that, the game uses randomization to set players on a path, and there’s something like a 2% chance that they could just happen to get the same path twice in a row if they chose to replay. I was fine with that being statistically possible to happen. But having experienced one such “2%” scenario from my playthrough of Imprimatura, I realize that in hindsight, I should’ve been more critical of how I chose to deploy randomness and account for fringe outcomes for that player’s experience. So that’s the lesson I learned: sometimes true randomness is too neutral, and it needs to be rigged slightly to smooth out the player’s experience. I guess I should’ve already learned this lesson from song shuffle algorithms, but it’s good to be reminded once in a while.
The painting construction at the end feels like a triumph of choice-based gameplay. You get to build a painting and see the result. But also, you don’t have so many choices that it feels overwhelming. What an aspirational game mechanic to encounter.
Quote:
“After that, it was impossible for her to paint.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
The final act of revising my painting, then naming it, letting me feel like I had attained creative control.
I just tried the very beginning, and one of the first commands I entered was “i” (inventory), which told me I was holding the button—maybe that should be the command in the walkthrough? Unless “inventory” isn’t meant to give it away so easily…
Editor’s note: This one is the actual full response to The Curse now that the technical errors have been resolved.
14 | THE CURSE
14 | THE CURSE By: Rob
Progress:
I died within the first 9 minutes of gameplay (yeah I know, I still suck at these), and a few more times along the way, but I managed to reach the end of the game in a total of 2hr01m (with a lot of help along the way).
What I Appreciated:
Because of how difficult this game was for me to set up, play, and understand, it was incredibly exhilarating to actually reach the end right when my 2-hour judging time limit was reached. Trying to find the exit from the pyramid was legitimately exciting because I knew I was this close to the end of the game and just had to figure out one or two more things. This is probably the most extreme emotion I’ve felt so far during this judging process, just like… the feeling of actually getting through this game that seemed to actively want me to not finish it with its enigmatic syntax and mysterious pop-up windows. I may not have what it takes to thrive in the 80s, but I survived this dose of them, and that’s enough for me.
There were many moments that I was legitimately surprised or amused by what happened, because of the writing. There are some really funny bits in there that give some spice to the experience.
Something I appreciate about this game is that despite its strange and somewhat unapproachable mechanics, as you play you start to develop a sense of the nightmare/dream logic that it operates on. There were times when I’d get clues to puzzles and think “Literally, what the hell does that mean,” but when I returned to it later I would have a sudden realization that made sense. An example of this was figuring out that I needed to pray at the altar, which didn’t click for me until I had thought about the inscription while wandering around elsewhere.
I really enjoyed the use of spooky sound effects and quickly disappearing pop-up windows. At first, I was annoyed that the images would appear for only a few seconds and vanish, but after a while I found that it added to the surreal experience. Any image that you needed to do something with wouldn’t disappear, so it was more a matter of contributing texture to the game experience.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
The place I was legitimately stuck was when I was required to dig in the cave to find a flute. I had already touched the walls and encountered an event, so I didn’t think there was anything else to do. (At this point I broke my personal rule of not reading other reviews before I develop my own but I needed help beyond what was available and thankfully Mathbrush’s discussion and the response here gave me the clue I needed to advance. I had been stuck at the house with the drawings. I recognized Anubis and the backwards message, but when I typed “sibuna” [not into the mirror itself later, but I typed it as a regular command while standing in the house] as an attempt to advance in this room, I got this incredibly surreal response: “Ibuna…Ibuna !!! / IMPL WAVE / Lo specchio ha vibrato…” I figured out that this was Italian and that “specchio” was a mirror, but I hadn’t discovered an examinable mirror yet (I could touch the mirror and be told it was cold, but I couldn’t examine it. This was fixed when I had the flute.) There were a few other moments when I received Italian (such as: RUOTA& RIMANE A ZERO when inputting incorrect guesses at the sphinx) but it fortunately wasn’t enough to stop me from proceeding.
In general, this game relies on kind of challenging logic at points, which can be both good and bad. Without a 2-hour time limit where I was determined to finish, I would’ve been less inclined to take hints, but I wanted to try to get through the game so I could judge the full experience. It’s hard to say if I would’ve solved every puzzle on my own. Maybe not, but it’s the kind of thing where taking breaks and returning later probably would help. Often, the game expects you to intuit the existence of something that hasn’t specifically been named. For instance, when inside a pyramid, there are certain locations where you can and should “examine walls” even when walls haven’t been noticed and pointed out by your character. But, as a player, you should intuit logically that you are in a space that has walls, even if you character hasn’t brought them to your attention in any way. I think with playing more types of games like this, that logic would come more naturally to me.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The main thing I’ll take away from this experience is how fostering an antagonistic relationship between the player and the game itself can lead to interesting experiences. For example, there were times when I typed “help” and the game would just remove 1 point without giving any more information, and I would be annoyed enough that it renewed my determination to figure it out. The writing lesson here is that you can use the game’s responses and error/fail messages to set a tone for the experience. In this case, the game used this to force me to meet the game on the game’s own terms. It commanded me to work to make sense of its (affectionately) unhinged 80s jankiness. I wouldn’t want that every time, but in this context where you are being promised/threatened with exactly that, it does make sense.
Another game design lesson here is how to make “dream logic” accessible to the player. Even though I am a very inexperienced parser game player and took twice as long as the expected playtime even with using hints along the way, there were still several times that I was able to think like the game wanted me to think to solve puzzles. So I would look to a few of this game’s puzzles as a case study for how something surreal can be more intuitive than it appears at first glance.
Quote:
“I’m digging… Great!! Look what I found!! [comedic pause] Absolutely nothing.” (I was seething. But very amused.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
The sound effect that plays when you master the art of dematerialization at the white sarcophagus.
I tried to insinuate a subtle hint from the inventory at the start and in the walkthrough give the direct action. It’s hard to strike a decent balance on some puzzles. Thanks for giving it a try .
hey, hope you don’t mind me asking, but could you say exactly what you did with the mirror? I am stuck at this same point . . . I can interact with the mirror, and there’s a text response field, but when I type SIBUNA it says the mirror breaks and then re-forms. Is there something else I need to be doing?
Or anyone else who knows the answer feel free to say.
I believe I typed “anubis” in the mirror text entry field. This should cause the mirror to glow with a bright light.
After that: I think I did something like “enter mirror”?
I’m sorry I don’t have better notes for you, the transcripts of each room would disappear when I changed locations so I wasn’t able to go back to see what I had already done.
I made several attempts to play this game, reaching a few different “bad” endings. Since there wasn’t an attached walkthrough and I wasn’t able to find any reviews for tips to help me, I timed out at the 2-hour mark and had to stop. I was not able to reach what I presume is the “good” (but may not actually be, for thematic reasons relevant to the game) ending where you dump all 100% of the sludge and can leave without becoming a mutant.
Things I Appreciated:
This game is incredibly disconcerting, disorienting, and nightmarish in its presentation that builds over the course of the game. I felt on edge throughout my first playthrough especially. The seemingly semi-random movements of the hostile bird and sludge-zombie-previous-coworker and constant reminders of where they were, along with the constant flickering/failure of the flashlight created a palpable sense that this environment actively despises you for what you are trying to do. Moreover, the writing regarding the sludge/fumes is especially tactile—it felt truly inescapable, soaking into the ground, the air, your skin, your lungs, leaking from the hose and pouring into the lake. That sensory detail lingers vividly.
I thought the perspective shift when you become Mutant Jake was interesting. Despite becoming the thing you’ve been trying to escape, and losing some faculties, the world becomes noticeably more inviting. The description for the forest changes, and there’s even beauty to be had in the lake.
I found the UI to be hostile, in an interesting way. Clicking through the links became this kind of serpentine process, stacking concepts on top of each other only to be unwound again. Though I eventually became more fluent in figuring out where to click to get to key items I was interacting with more efficiently, I never could truly create a durable mental map of the area I was in, it felt like a non-euclidean nightmare dimension.
The game is thematically very rich. Since I don’t know whether or not the “escape” ending is actually achievable, having not solved it, I would like to speculate on how interesting it would be if it was not actually achievable (that essentially, the game had a fake achievement for this ending to troll you). It would seem appropriate to me because as I played this game, I recognized a familiar pressure: if I only manage myself better, dart in to click the pump switch often enough but still avoid too much prolonged exposure to the sludge—if I always keep track of that and the bird and the mutant and the flashlight just right, I could do this. The manual tells you that you should use protective equipment that isn’t there. It tells you that damaged equipment should be replaced, yet you have the shittiest leaky hose, finnicky flashlight, and temperamental pump that collude to ruin your dream of doing what? Finishing the night’s shift so you can just die tomorrow? Or the night after that? Bill’s previous partner mutated or died. You will mutate or die. Bill will mutate or die. The boundary between flesh and sludge will dissolve; your skin is the leaky hose, inescapably permeable. You might wash your hands again and again, but you cannot wash your hands of this. With that in mind, returning to the original point I speculated on: even if that achievement is real, which it probably is, I don’t know that achieving it would be anything more than a pyrrhic victory, for the reasons just elaborated. But I won’t know for sure until someone else solves the game and discusses it where I can see it.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
I think since I didn’t properly finish the game (as far as I can tell), I think perhaps the most useful thing I could do here, rather than offering recommendations, is just to elaborate on my gameplay approach and describe how the game taught me to play it.
On my first playthrough, I was completely disoriented because I had no concept that the different areas (e.g., field, hill, shore, path) are around the same truck. Previous games have primed to think of locations being more distinct from each other, so I confused myself into thinking there were at least 3 different trucks because of the different locations that a truck appears at (i.e., there’s the truck that’s at a hill, a truck that’s at the shore, a truck that’s at a field). I think not helping me here was my mental image of “truck” defaults to a pickup truck, as opposed to a giant tanker truck. I definitely could’ve read the context better to avoid these misconceptions. In this playthrough, I read the manual but never found the hose, so I just opened the valve and let the sludge spill everywhere and became a mutant pretty fast.
In the second playthrough, I was like, ok, there’s got to be a hose. And there was. So I “properly” set up the hose to drain the sludge into the lake. I spent my time at the shore babysitting the pump, but eventually I had the same issue where I mutated before completing the task.
I tried another approach where I would wander around the scenes to avoid spending too much time at once at the shore where the pollution is the worst, but this would inevitably result in getting killed by the mutant after it grew tired of my attempts to ward it off.
I realized that the mutant never entered the truck, and the truck interior was also safe from the fumes, so my next attempt was to set up the hose, open the valve, and then sit in the truck for the entire duration of the draining process. I think once the pump switches off, it drains at 1% per turn, so I cycled through clicking Jake → Wait → Jake → Wait → Jake → Flashlight → Hit → Jake → Wait etc. This results in the player experiencing the most mind-numbing radio and conversation with bill. But, it is completely safe from the contamination and mutant, so I sat through it. I think at least 40-50 minutes of my 2 hours were probably just runs where I attempted to do this. I probably shouldn’t have played so conservatively, but I was convinced that any amount of contamination exposure was so risky that I could not justify a reason other than out of boredom to risk leaving the truck after the draining process started.
The second time I enabled save/loading so I could test what happens once you actually drain it completely. My run appeared to be drawing dead at that point though; after sitting for 100 turns in the truck, the mutant was hyper aggressive and would kill me almost instantly, or I would get contaminated trying to retrieve the equipment. There must be some kind of in-game timer to punish the camping strategy that I tried to use.
On a late run, I received a hint from Bill that there could be a way for the pump switch to be pressed down permanently. In one of my mutant runs I had gnawed on the switch resulting in a click, so I speculated that it might be possible for the player to induce the mutant to gnaw on the pump switch for you while you’re still human. Perhaps the bird is involved, I never could figure out what to do with the bird at all beyond just scaring it off.
I timed out at that point, but were I to continue playing, I would have tried to see if I could get good RNG for the mutant to gnaw on the switch for me, if that’s possible.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
One element of the game that stood out to me was just how brutally tedious it was to use my camping strategy of clicking Jake → Wait → Jake → Wait over and over again in the truck. It got me thinking about how, maybe as a game designer, you could discourage a self-destructive playstyle by making it mechanically tedious to perform. I get the sense that the game was probably cuing me not to spend 100 turns in the truck to wait out the timer, and I was being unnecessarily stubborn by resisting the pressure to take any exposure risk. As a game design lesson, it makes me think one could weaponize the situational clunkiness of a UI to help guide the player away from unproductive approaches to the puzzle.
This game is a good case study in NPC behavior for an IF game. I haven’t seen too much of this yet, but it seems like the mutant and bird move to different locations based on a logic that the player has to decode, with some agency to influence it (by scaring them off, for instance). The player is given information about what these NPCs are doing, with the level of detail dependent on proximity. For the horror atmosphere as well, the constant reminders of what the mutant is doing makes its presence feel appropriately oppressive.
Quote:
“All around, beautiful and unnameable things slid through the water, casting deformed shadows and reflecting incandescent colors.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
The intense dread after you’re told you’ve crossed the mutation event horizon, but before the transformation has taken place, not knowing how long you have left or what that process will be like.
Hi.
First of all THANK YOU for all the time (one of the most precious things in the world) you have dedicated to my game.
When, many months ago, I decided to work on The Curse for IF COMP I was full of doubts.
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.
The language difficulties…
A decidedly uncomfortable implementation ( in this fast and “mobile” world not everyone today has the time to sit in front of a PC to launch an executable).
A stylistic choice that goes against the grain…
Among true masterpieces of prose (Interactive Fiction) I presented an “old” Textual Adventure with puzzles and an almost non-existent plot.
I didn’t know how it would be received.
But the desire to save the code lost in oblivion in an old folder on my PC and send it “somewhere else” was stronger than giving up…
Today I’m happy I did it.
I think every IF author wants to receive reviews like yours for their creations.
Ps: During the game update some locations were completely changed.
Entire sections of code became “dead branches” that I lazily didn’t remove.
I said to myself “who on earth will give that command?”
Murphy teaches that you should never trust.
You have even found my control notes of a variable in testing!
I’m glad you found them.
I don’t know why.
Ps: I’d like to ask you a question (I need it for my statistics).
This text will be blurred[/spoiler]While playing did you find “The Note”?[spoiler]This text will be blurred
I’m aware that the story is rough and could definitely use some polish. For me, this was more about having something finished and public than polished. I haven’t done a creative project like this in 10+ years and just needed something real to show myself I can do it.
Like you observed, this was an experiential piece meant as a relaxing 15-ish minute getaway. I’m really glad that the heart of the piece finds it’s way through. The emotional qualities of the fleetingness of time’s passage you describe was definitely part of the vibe I was going for.
While I understand my writing is a bit rough-around-the-edges, I was worried about the overall quality of the writing. It’s seems that may have been a bit misplaced as it seems the areas I know I can improve / have done better on are the ones that you’ve identified here. So I know I’m not totally off base.
Thank you very much for the constructive review, I appreciate the feedback. I’m glad you were able to enjoy it in it’s current state. I’m thinking about remaking it into a full game/story.
If you explore more of the map, you can find some duct tape, which will hold the switch down properly. On my first run I used that, got the tank emptied, but then couldn’t figure out how to actually leave, so I ended up mutating anyway.
Some of the things I found outside of the core puzzle included:
Stones (I picked these up at two locations, north of the plane crash site, and at the house, but I don’t remember that I ever used them, unless they were perhaps used automatically to accomplish one of the tasks)
Branches (I picked these up at the Fog of Perdition and never used them. I tried using them to reach the cave ceiling where the water was dripping from, which didn’t work.)
Bones (I picked these up in a basement room of the pyramid with the skeletons and never used them. At the time I picked them up hoping to use them to wedge the half-stuck sphinx open more but I ended up needing to discover the infinite well to advance here if I recall correctly)
Collar (I used the bracelet, my guess in hindsight is that the collar is also there to avoid softlocks in the event that the player advances past the Fog of Perdition before finding the bracelet)
The America easter egg that changed my player’s name to “Nobody” in the south desert area.
An easter egg from touching the cave wall which was a kind of memorial/reminiscence
I got a point for using the “wait” command for “discovering time” or something similar. After that I was told off for wasting water in the desert when I did that.
So, no note that I can recall! I didn’t score very well (I think my final score was something like 13 out of 40) on account of asking for in-game hints, so I assume there are a bunch more easter eggs that I missed. Hopefully others will find that in their playthroughs!
That makes sense! Damn. I can’t fathom where it was, I went to the truck, forest, dense forest, shore, surface of lake, hill, field, path, dirt road, highway, and never found any duct tape in any of the times I was at those places. Well, I feel silly for thinking that inducing a mutant to gnaw on the pump for me was a realistic solution there.
