Into The Sun (Dark Star)
Played on: 15th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 1hr 20mins to score $1590, plus 10 mins noodling around
(Content warning: this game has a little gore in it right from the start, though it’s not discussed in the review.)
(Full disclosure: Dark Star and I tested each other’s games for IFComp 2020. I’ve had nothing to do with this game, though.)
Into the Sun is a Z-Code parser-based game, which is billed as taking an hour to play but which has plenty of replay value beyond that. In this sci-fi horror, you need to salvage as many materials from an abandoned spaceship as possible before it drifts into the sun – but you’re not alone in the ship.
This is an optimisation game in the style of Curse of the Scarab or Sugarlawn or Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder. (Disclaimer: I’ve only played Sugarlawn out of these. Curse of the Scarab is cited as the main influence, but I can’t say how much Into the Sun draws from it.) As in those games, you’re moving through a map picking up as many valuables as efficiently as possible, planning around the need to find keys for locked doors and that kind of thing. But there’s a monster moving around the map unpredictably, and it can outrun you, and you only have so much weaponry to fend it off before you run out of shots. My experience of playing Into the Sun was not the maths-y graph-theory puzzling of Sugarlawn, but rather a tense game of risk-and-reward, trying to balance time and resources and having to gamble on the monster not being nearby as you delve into dead-ends to gather objects. It’s a fantastic idea.
The monster is the big obstacle to your efforts, and worth delving into. But first, let’s give it its proper name. The blurb on the IFComp ballot doesn’t give the game away, but if you read the in-game About text or pick up on a few familiar brand names in the ship, you’ll realise where you are: this is the Nostromo, and you’re up against the xenomorph, aka the alien from Alien. This is another point of ignorance for me because I haven’t watched Alien either, but you don’t need to know about Alien outside of picking up on references. It’s enough to know that the xenomorph is after you, and that you don’t want it to catch you.
You have a grace period at the start of the game until the xenomorph wakes up (or until you stumble on where it’s sleeping). Once it’s on the move, environmental messages alert you to where it is; if it’s just a few rooms away, you’ll be told of noises to your starboard or your aft or wherever (this game uses nautical directions instead of compass directions), and whether it’s moved towards you or away. This gives you just enough information to plan your next couple of moves, but is vague enough to keep you on your toes – you’re only told of one direction at a time, so just because it’s starboard of you doesn’t mean it’s directly starboard of you. Sometimes it stays still, and the environmental messages imply it’s listening out for you. I don’t know how much is actually going on with the xenomorph’s AI – whether it’s moving purely randomly or whether it’s actively seeking you – but the writing is pretty good at suggesting you’re up against something you have to outwit.
You can’t wait for it to move forever, though, because your other enemy is time: a gravity meter in the status bar slowly ticks up move by move, Into the Sun’s answer to the time constraint found in other optimisation games. Deviously, it doesn’t tick up linearly, but instead picks up pace as you drift closer to the sun, meaning that what looked like plenty of time suddenly becomes no time at all to make a mad dash to the airlock. Waiting advances the clock, which led to a couple of tense standoffs in my run as I wasted time waiting for the xenomorph on the other side of the door to mosey on. The gravity also ticks up every time you move or get something, or some other action like that, but lets you examine things for free, as in Sugarlawn. This introduces an unfortunate gameplay exploit, because the xenomorph moves every turn no matter what you do. If you know it’s on the other side of the door and you need it to go away, you can just examine something over and over again until the alien moves on (or enters the room and forces your hand) without wasting any gravity – surely not an intentional gameplay mechanic when waiting is so expensive. (Maybe this is easily fixed by not moving the xenomorph if the gravity meter hasn’t increased?)
You could, of course, also save time by using undo and save/restore liberally until you dodge the xenomorph successfully. Nothing’s stopping you! (I’d hate to lose my precious undo, but maybe this game would benefit from a mode which disables the undo command?) But the xenomorph has one more trick which is much harder to manipulate. It will occasionally destroy another room while searching for you, melting everything in acid. Anything valuable you haven’t picked up will be gone. But this might help you, too – in my run, the alien melted a desk with a locked drawer while I was searching for a key elsewhere, which opened the drawer and let me grab the contents later. There’s some very interesting gameplay design going on in Into the Sun, especially on a second run when you know what you’re looking for – a lot of gameplay systems are about trade-offs like this, whether it’s better to visit a room now, or come back to it later at the risk of the xenomorph getting to it first, or come back and hope the xenomorph gets to it first.
This game defies the ways in which I thought optimisation games worked. All the tropes are there, and you can certainly go for a high score (the game claims you aren’t scored, but the ending definitely changes based on the dollar-value of items you escape with). But the survival-horror twist turns it into a game of risk. I boiled Sugarlawn down to one perfect run, but I don’t think I can do that to Into the Sun, because the monster’s movement and whatever randomisation there is might scupper whatever I have in mind unless I want to save and restore and save and restore endlessly. (I’m not actually sure what’s randomised here – the map must be the same each time, given the maps provided with the zip file, and the keycodes you get probably change, but I don’t know what else does.) There are almost certainly tricks I haven’t found, and ways you can lure the alien which I don’t know about. But for now, this seems much more survival-horror than puzzle to me.
Anyway, it’s a good game. Very tense if you let yourself be immersed in it. I think I’m glad I don’t know exactly how everything works yet – keeps the next run interesting if/when I get back to this.