I was drawn to this next one by its inscrutable cover art and the fact that the blurb reminded me a bit of last year’s All Hands Abandon Ship, a game which I have fond memories of playing—I discovered within the first few turns that it was possible to nonchalantly flush critical items down the toilet, much to my delight. Will R.A. Cooper’s debut parser adventure deliver similar thrills? Let’s find out…
Review of Awakened Deeply
Awakened Deeply puts you in the shoes of a somewhat discombobulated spaceship captain with the dual imperative of investigating the disaster that has occurred aboard your ship, and ultimately responding to it. As a game, I think it is a success. As a story, though, it was often rough around the edges.
Let’s start with what I liked the most. The puzzles here are of familiar types—where do you use the item, what number do you enter on the keypad—that you probably enjoy if you’re the type of person who is choosing to play this game in the first place. I had fun with them; they’re varied enough and bite-sized enough that each new challenge felt fresh and I never felt fatigued by the game.
I didn’t have any major issues with the parser. This may be in part because the author helpfully supplies a list of necessary verbs in the readme, and I happened to read that list before I even started playing. There are a few areas where more synonyms would have been welcome (e.g. I was thrown off track for a little while by trying to look under the placard when what I really needed to do was look down), but overall the level of banging-head-against-wall was well within normal limits.
My most substantial criticism of the mechanical design and implementation is that the world is a bit spartan. Some rooms got a bit of scenery (and the space descriptions were really nice), but others got none. There are a small handful of items that can be examined for lore, beyond which relatively few objects are implemented except those which are necessary for the puzzles. Some players will prefer it this way: no distractions and a clear focus on what is mechanically necessary. I am not one of those players. I value red herrings, stuff to comb through and mess with.
But those are quibbles. The writing quality is where Awakened Deeply has the most room for improvement.
Right off the bat, I noticed something that would prove to be a thorn in my side for the entire experience: there are a whole lot of words, especially object names, that have the first letter capitalized when it really shouldn’t be. Not the gravest sin in the world, but something an extra editing pass ought to fix.
In terms of character work, it wasn’t easy for me to get a grasp of what Captain Pitker is really all about. If he has emotions, they’re seldom described, even under the most dramatic of circumstances. His modus operandi—finding something important, yelling “what the hell” or some variation thereof out loud at great risk to himself, and then giving no further indication of emotional resonance—had me wondering if he was stumbling about in some state of cryostasis-induced pseudo-drunkenness. But then he’d inevitably do something astoundingly prescient or quick-witted, shatter that image, and leave me wondering again what type of guy this is.
My overall feeling about the narrative is that it’s mainly there to buttress the gameplay, and could have used a bit more time in the oven. There are quite a few questions that I thought were going to be answered or at least should have been, but never were.
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Why was the captain in cryostasis for 4 years in the first place? This isn’t some seed ship drifting around the cosmos for a few centuries, it’s a science vessel where the rest of the crew was apparently awake and hard at work.
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Why is the communicator code semi-hidden on the walls and floor of the warehouse? Who put that there?
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Why did the attackers bother to drag the giant pile of corpses into the storage room if they’re planning to cast the ship off into the furthest reaches of space, never to be seen again, anyway?
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Why does the laser cut tungsten but not steel?
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Why are so many of the puzzles themed around something that the real-life player might not immediately know how to do, but which the player character, the captain of the ship, should immediately know how to do without any challenge, like using a communicator or unlocking the ship’s doors? It feels like there’s too great a disconnect between the player and the character.
Still, I had fun with Awakened Deeply, and if I spent more time criticizing than praising it, it’s only because I feel like a little more work in the right places could have taken it from “pretty neat” to “really solid.”
In the hope of ending on a high note, I present my favorite moment from my transcript.
It is pitch dark, and you can’t see a thing.
>x darkness
You can’t see any such thing.