The Universal Robot (Assembled By Hex)
Agnieszka Trzaska
This was pretty delightful! The worldbuilding is amusing/dystopian, and in no time at all, I had identified with and was rooting for our protagonist. And shortly after that, I was trying things that worked and feeling clever for having figured them out.
In general, the design is pretty tight, and well put together: you start off with a variety of Things To Experiment With, and Obvious Goals, and can see where you’re going to need things you can’t get yet, but the new obstacles seem equally surmountable. All the while, your puzzle solving is taking you around the station, familiarizing you with hints of further options and stuff you don’t need yet, but not too much down the ‘I can’t tell if these are red herrings or immediately useful’ route.
Then you get to the end, and at that point, I had several different things I wanted to try to end the game in different ways, and most of them worked! And all you really need at that point is a way to get to at least one vaguely positive ending, which seems pretty likely to me. But the lure of the rest of the dozen endings was compelling enough that I then stuck around for that, too! And it was also great!
Did the author have anything to say? You know, mostly yes! There was the mostly-standard, ‘gee, companies are kind of awful, amirite?’ but also stories of resilience in the midst of oppression, which was kind of satisfying.
Did I have something to do? Probably the most out of any of the Spring Thing games I’ve played so far! I figured out a lot of stuff, and then was sufficiently intrigued by the ‘find all the endings’ challenge that I stuck with it (getting a bunch of hints from @allyson along the way) and even though I was getting hints, I still felt clever any time I made the final leap of logic and got a new ending. And all the endings were great, and I now have several favorites, and not just one. Bonus!