Into The Sun
There are a lot of nits against this game: the basic premise is highly reminiscent of " Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder" by Ryan Veeder, another game where you’re scavenging stuff from a sinking ship. The text is spare but not very evocative, with several grammatical errors scattered throughout. The setting is explicitly stolen from a famous movie without adding anything in particular to it. An alien starts smashing things on the ship just after you arrive, despite having been on board for several decades. Meeting the scary alien in person is not scary in the slightest; you mostly just wander where the alien isn’t.
All that said, the puzzles and overall goal of the game is kind of charming! It follows the tried-and-true pattern of discovery → understanding → mastery, which is always inherently satisfying, and I never had to use any hints. My first playthrough consisted of wandering around the ship, gradually putting together what’s going on and how the landscape is changing, and solved a few puzzles. Then I restarted with a plan, altered the plan a bit as I went, and finally escaped with a good amount of loot and a positive ending.
I felt like there might have been a bit more to the game than I was able to discover: I never figured out what to do with a few fixed-in-place items (the battery, the handcart, and the keyboard), and got the vague sense that it might have been possible to deal with the alien in some permanent manner–though if I abandoned it on the ship, I guess it would die anyway? In the end, I was reasonably happy with my ending, though perhaps I’ll troll online and see if there were other things I missed.
Did the author have something to say? : Not really.
Did I have something to do? : Yes! And it was enjoyable! I even downloaded a mapper just so I could create a map, and it enhanced my playing experience!