Mooncrash! (Laura)
Played on: 14th September
How I played it: Downloaded, played with Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 15mins for four endings
Mooncrash! feels very off-kilter, and I mean that as a compliment. This parser game sees you hopping around a fantasy world trying to do something about the impending apocalypse. That’s already a pretty strong premise, and the way the author approaches it feels very unusual for IFComp. I feel Mooncrash! is one of the games I’ll remember most strongly. (As someone who’s also written a game with a name that ends in an exclamation mark, I will be respecting it every time I write the title.)
What we have here is essentially five games in one; four simultaneous scenarios, plus an endgame. The four scenarios all recreate a different sub-type of interactive fiction: a turn-based RPG, an inventory-based puzzler, a deep conversation, and a maze (no, don’t run away, it’s a fair maze and there’s a way around it). Most of these give you a set number of turns to accomplish them, which sounds frustrating on paper, but you usually have more than enough turns; the timer usually serves as an ever-present reminder that, well, the end is coming.
Before these, though, comes Mooncrash!’s first unusual twist: An opening personality test asks you what you’d value if you knew the apocalypse was coming, and then assigns you a starting scenario based on the results. Mechanically this is pointless since you’re free to ignore it and choose a different scenario, and you’ll need to take all paths anyway to get to the endgame. But its actual value is as a clever narrative trick – it encourages you to consider the personal stakes of the apocalypse, not just the wider stakes.
None of the different chapters are unsuccessful, but some work better than others. For my money the best of the bunch is that extended conversation with the Fateweaver (a name that would be right at home in a Bioware RPG), who you’re trying to convince to help save the world while a countdown to the apocalypse steadily ticks away. It’s a philosophical exploration of somebody with a completely alien set of moral values, and it’s fascinating. (It’s capped off nicely with a potential ending you can get in the final segment by following the Fateweaver’s advice – the twist there is getting a little cliché, but it’s done with such aplomb that I don’t care.) And I’d love to see an extended version of that RPG scenario – it’s a little too easy to grind in its current form, but the basic combat system is good, and the encounter design is just plain cool.
Mooncrash! is such an interesting case which the usual comments about implementation don’t quite apply. There are many oversights here which I would normally pick on – examining the player character produces the “As good-looking as ever” boilerplate text, there’s rarely any response for examining anything else, there’s no “credits” or “about” command (though credits are given in the intro and blurb), and so on. Often these suggest an author who rushed their game and didn’t pay attention. But in fact, the important parts of Mooncrash! have obviously had a great deal of care taken over them. The different scenarios are meant to be played through in the same save file, and they can be chosen in any order and replayed; from experience, I know this takes a lot of very thorough work and testing to get right, to make sure you clear the player’s inventory and shuffle all objects and event flags back to how they should be. Additionally, the author’s implemented her own choice-based dialogue system, where topics are selected with a “choose topic” command, without the use of Inform extensions. This is pretty impressive! (I’m very curious how it works. It looks like objects representing the topics are being shuffled in and out of the rooms so that the player can interact with them? It’s a bit of a fudge, if that’s right, but show me an Inform 7 game that doesn’t fudge the engine a little. If it works, it works!)
Even so, I think I’d like a bit of extra work done on the implementation. It’s probably a good idea that not many things can be examined (the player is frequently on a timer, so discouraging spending time on examination is helpful), but it might be nice to change the default failure responses just to add a bit of extra personality to the game. (Even just a little change like swapping the default examine message from “You can’t see any such thing” to “That’s not important right now” might help… although you’d still have to check if the player is examining something that is important, like the NPCs). I also think that the “choose” command could do with a shortcut, like “c topic” since it’s so frequently used. Just little bits of polish and tidying here and there.
It’s taken me a while to write this review (and I’ve cut out discussion of the setting and story just to get it done) because I’m worried it all comes off as backhanded compliments. It has flaws but it’s ~ambitious~ and ~fun~. But damn it, it is fun. We’ve all played games, read books, watched films etc. which were put together perfectly but which were boring as hell. I really liked playing Mooncrash! and that counts for a lot.