A D R I F T, by Pinkunz
(So the annoying title is actually clever, because the added spaces indicate the letters are drifting apart from each other – get it, drifting? – but I’m only typing it that way the once).
The opening of Adrift is eerily reminiscent of that of the main festival’s Orbital Decay – sure, “astronaut must fight for survival after an EVA gone wrong” isn’t the world’s most recondite premise, but it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity (sidenote – it’s been almost ten years since the movie Gravity???) and I don’t remember playing any other bits of IF with this exact setup, so I’m very curious about what’s in the water that led to this coincidence.
At any rate, it’s a grabby way to open a game and it’s effective here too. Unlike Orbital Decay, Adrift is a parser game, so proceedings are unsurprisingly more puzzle-oriented. It’s also unfinished, consisting of just the first two challenges and ending after you manage to get back to your shuttle. This isn’t a completely polished slice of the game released separately as a teaser, mind – there are lots of indications that the game still needs some love and care, from a fair number of typos to the noticeable fall-off in scenery objects as the excerpt reaches its end. The puzzles also suffer from a bit of guess-the-verb-itis, with the second in particular requiring the player to type a vaguer approach to the solution because the more specific commands aren’t recognized (I’d realized that I needed to swing the crate on my spacesuit’s tether, but all my attempts to TIE or ATTACH it failed; turns out you just need to SWING CRATE).
This is all fair enough for the Back Garden, though, so while I’ll include all the niggles I found at the end of this post in case it’s useful to the author (I played on my phone so no transcript, sorry!), I was still able to enjoy the teaser for what it is, and would look forward to playing the completed game. For one thing, there’s more worldbuilding and personality on display here than the lost-in-space setup strictly requires, with integrated flashbacks lightly sketching an alternate history where the Soviet Union stuck around and showing our cosmonaut hero pining for his Lyudmilla, which mixes up the more-typical all-American space fantasy (albeit the war in Ukraine makes this less fun than it could be, sadly). There’s also some cool pixel-art headers that shift as you play, helping to set the mood, and I liked the physics-based nature of the puzzles, which made them satisfying to solve. As a result, it’s not too hard to squint and see what the more robust finished product would look like after completing the design and some rigorous testing, so I hope this review sends a strong signal to the author to get working!
Notes on bugs and typos
• There’s no ABOUT text
• The exposition being delivered through changing location-descriptions should probably also work if the player waits (or takes some other actions beyond just looking)
• X BLACK and X SPACE don’t do anything, despite what feels like prompting. Then later, X SHUTTLE, X ENGINE, X MANIFOLD, X DOORS similarly don’t turn up anything after drifting closer to it. The red button exists, but has no description. X TETHER gives you a “1” which is confusing!
• TURN MYSELF and ROTATE MYSELF should have a response (you can’t do that, probably) in the opening sequence
• Something seems weird with the spinner – after X SPINNER, SPIN IT doesn’t work since pronouns aren’t set, and when I typed SPIN SPINNER it fired an implicit take even though I was already carrying it.
• OPEN CRATE says it’s not something you can open, and THROW CRATE gives a default that-wouldn’t-accomplish-anything response when it would, just not enough.
• Some typos – sorry, I don’t know exactly where they were but hopefully a CTRL-F will turn them up! A redundant “and but”’ “allude” for “elude”; “stretches taunt” for “taut”; “plain” for “plane”; “twirling a stone in swing” for “a sling”; “oxygent”