I’m trying to make my notes and worked exercises more accessible than hiding in the forums, so I made a GitHub repo of them.
Turns out giving myself four homework exercises, plus working on new exercises, is quite a lot of homework for the month. So I’ve certainly worked on the writing/design/implementation exercises I set, but haven’t finished them.
Slow play of Detritus
In 2025 I started Detritus in the middle of IF Comp, given the buzz around it. I hit it at the wrong time, and put it off so I could deal with it appropriately. Then I put it off and put it off… I forced myself to hit the game head on by making an exercise of it. I’m so glad I did. It’s a fantastic game, well-constructed along many different axes.
Luckily I only have to cover one realm in this exercise: the related aspects of approachability, on-boarding, agency and difficulty. The goals were:
- Identify scenes of player onboarding.
- Map out the hint system.
- Observe how difficulty settings affect the narrative and mechanics.
I marvelled at the introductory sequence, where most of the important story and game-mechanical elements are introduced in layers. Right from the get-go, you have to deal with the metaphysical nastiness of being replicated. Then it slots in the gravity being out, the ship’s damage, the fabricator, the recycler, the scarcity of resources and the storage locker. The ship’s damage in particular reads like a to-do list for the PC for later. I like how the floating debris is ignored because in the story, you hadn’t quite grokked its necessity for survival, and gameplay-wise it wasn’t time yet.
We’re given some freedom but not too much as you are nudged towards the first trap: opening the corridor door. It’s a nasty trick but it’s good design - it sets the stakes, reinforces the recycling bodies theme, and gives the world an extra bit of detail, namely your dead body floating about.
This reset then opens up into the wider game where you can attack rooms in whatever order you choose. There is a general order to them in terms of requirements to get in, but there are a few ways through each door so it really is your choice. I don’t think you can sequence-break too much.
The datapads were both snippets of world/plot-building and a progression signpost. I thought Ben was tricksy and would put the next datapad in order wherever I found it… until I skipped a few letters. He had a few secret affordances like that: if you were low on oxygen and the rest was stuck behind doors, you could almost assuredly find some in the debris orbiting the ship. And because it was orbiting, you could conceivably pull this trick again and again.
The onboarding was quite nice and felt integral to the game. It told ample story, whilst gently nudging through the mechanics and constraints. I like that fast travel came early and intuitively (by looking at the map). The progression of backpack space was a nice set of milestones, spaced (for me) appropriately across my experience.
I didn’t map out the hint system, but I did take notes. I played initially on default difficulty (Normal - 2). It was surprising how often the game would outright tell you what to do, either indirectly or very directly, but never felt like it was doing so. It felt natural in the story. Open tasks would regularly suggest a course of action when examined.
After my first game I came back and played on level 0, Story Mode. This opened up explicit hints on the side, which did a good job pointing you in useful directions. On top of all this, the game had a walkthrough and hints in the Settings. If you were lost in this game, I think you weren’t reading the text.
I didn’t permanently die in either game, except when I intentionally pushed it. The game will happily kill you to remind you of the stakes, but is very generous with autosaves and increasingly urgent hints about avoiding death. Story mode was very easy, partly because I had successfully finished the game but also because of all the help it gives you. The pressure of resource management felt firmer in level 2 than level 0, and I feel like level 3 would require you to be a lot more efficient and you’d be forever aware of death lurking around every corner. None of it felt like a Sugarlawn run though.
On my first run I didn’t reload (bridge) GAIL, which was a narrative choice for me and I enjoyed that this was recognized by the game. Second time through I did reload her, and new extra deadline imposed was surprising. It was not too short to radically change the game, but it was another pressure point.
One thing I noticed and initially frowned at, but came around on, was the mix of tone. There’s some great horror in this game - the dangers of space, the awkwardness of replicating bodies, and the outright body-horror later in the game. But strewn throughout the game there was a satirical zaniness, about 30% of a Douglas Adams. For example, the ration pack advertises “Now with added Vitamins, Carbohydrates, and Microplastics!” I feel like this tonal mismatch actually works in the end. Without it, Detritus is a bleak grind. The little bits of humour and beauty through the world help the player through the journey, which is its own form of difficulty management.
I’m glad I chose to look at Detritus in terms of affordances, tutorialisation and difficulty. It was a superb example, and just one of the many things that the game did right.
