Detritus
Twine. You’ve awakened on a spaceship. You don’t remember exactly what happened, but the ship is heavily damaged. You’re trying to stay alive and figure out what happened to the ship and your crewmates.
Congrats to the comp winner! It’s cool to see something slightly different win, a more system-based and mostly serious sci-fi game. This does has some solid puzzles too, though when I think about the experience I think more about its crafting and recycling mechanic, which works well in always reminding me of the whole survival and danger aspects of the ship, even if I never came close to actually dying (it was easy enough to always craft a spare O2 tank, or whatever the next resource I was going to run out of next was and carry it around). There’s also a limited inventory component. I played on normal.
The presentation is all excellent, especially the little typed display text from all the terminals. Excellent moody music choice. Great font choices. UI works well; there’s a lot of things to juggle and interfaces to interact with.
There’s a sodoku-like hacking puzzles to open some of the ship doors which I found surprisingly effective. Surprising because I don’t play Sodoku, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they provided just the right amount of challenge without ever actually getting me stuck, and they felt good to solve.
There are brief flashbacks to fill in story gaps. Lots of games and movies and books use flashbacks in these sorts of sci-fi settings (Project Hail Mary used them a lot, the book; I saw there was a movie version coming out). I think they’re fine, but I did feel at one point that it hadn’t seemed that long ago that I’d seen the last one, and there hadn’t been enough time or story in between.
There’s a really good balance between puzzle obstacles and resource gathering, a strong sense of what I might always want to tackle or do next that kept me focused and engaged. It felt oddly relaxing just finding the stuff in rooms and then transporting the stuff to the recycler. And there were small pockets of action and intrigue throughout.
Of the items, I did find all the datapads to be a bit unwieldy by the end. They contain the backstory snippets, basically, and I wasn’t sure if I should recycle them since I thought they might be evidence or something useful later, so I had them all floating around in the fabrication room. If I did want to look up the text on one, I’d just look through each of them until I found the right one. I suppose the regular videogame way to handle it would be to collect all the messages on some sort of journal interface menu, instead of having them as inventory objects? Not that bothersome, but noticeable.
I didn’t necessarily process the story too much; in broad strokes, I understood there was a corporate entity and a possibly rogue ship AI, but the brief flashbacks where a lot of the story is expounded are quite short and I didn’t feel like too much time was spent on getting any real sense of the characters, which is fine, focus lay elsewhere; instead what really comes through is the general atmosphere and the more immediate focus on survival, which were both pervasive. The story has a couple of bigger story moments, one of which is quite effective (the captain’s biometrics) and another which I found a bit confusing: finally getting into the cargo bay; in that moment I didn’t really understand what the AI was doing precisely and what its goal was, and nothing it was doing seemed quite as “big” of a line crossed as what I’d already done earlier to get on the elevator. I think this is one of those sections where I might’ve reread the pages in a book, but I just continued on here. I also don’t tend to try to puzzle out stories that you might need to piece together a bit; like there was a “figure out what happened” type of thread on here for Hadean Lands, and one this year for Type Help and those are neat, but I guess it’s not how I treat stories. What I did get were the general emotions in the cargo bay scene, the betrayal and the horror. There are multiple endings depending on some of your choices, including a big one at the end, and the endings were also quite interesting.
There’s also two particularly memorable puzzles, both of which I thought worked quite well: solving the biometrics which was just a really great moment, and getting the ignition parts reassembled which took a bit of thinking.
The title works in multiple ways: of course there’s the actual detritus you’re finding all along the ship, but also the bigger point about how you and your crewmates are viewed: as inefficient numbers on a spreadsheet by your bosses, and as bits of data by the AI. Your humanity is extraneous in the way they process the world, as meaningful as the irreparably damaged bits of the ship that you’re collecting, just things to be recycled into something that yields greater value.
Ending I got
96%
Locations visited: 14 of 14
Datapads read: 11 of 12
Schematics added: 10 of 12
Security-locked data: 1 of 3
Achievements: Recycled over 50 items (61) 
Level 3 items: Multi-tool Large backpack MaxiRations
You chose to reconnect GAIL to the helm.
You did not think that people would care, and voted to go on strike.
You witnessed your original death.
You left GAIL ‘alive’ within the Rover bot.
You started as ‘Jean’, but ended as ‘Matheus’.
Ending (1c)
In the end, you sacrificed your life in order to destroy the ship and everything it contained.
…and were able to find enough incriminating evidence against the company.
You can load the most recent autosave to view the other endings.