Dead Sea
Binggang Zhuo
Reader, I almost gave up on this game. Fortunately, I persevered, and my experience dramatically increased for the last half of the game.
This is a pretty clunky game, and I’m kind of amused at my own sense of entitlement when a different game entered in this very comp (‘The Promises of Mars’) had an innovation (the clickable map) that I immediately wanted in this game. Despite the fact that the author would, of course, have not had access to the game to even begin to imagine the possibility of doing things that way. That said: it was awkward to click directions to go places, especially when the main mechanic of the puzzles (as in ‘Promises’) was ‘get X from room Y, use in room Z’.
The writing was very, very spare, and reminded me of the writing in ‘A Dark Room’, the very popular text-based idle game that came out several years ago. That kind of writing implies more than it states, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the gaps. Which is great, until I’m awkwardly clicking around the map trying to find the exit I missed, while the game wants me to trade a fish for a watermelon. There’s only so much gap I can fill in for a fish-watermelon trade, man.
Fortunately, from there we start trending more serious, and you get some nice background reveals and reasonable puzzles, and the spare writing started to sound less bored and more mysterious the further I got. I’m not entirely sure I understood the entirety of why I did what I did to get to the ‘True End’ of the story, but it felt emotionally resonant. Mostly.
Did the author have anything to say? They had bits of interesting backstory and worldbuilding to share, and a bit of a plot to share, along with some goofy bits.
Did I have anything to do? Fill in the rest of the backstory and worldbuilding myself (which kind of worked!), solve some basic puzzles, and blunder around the map.