Awakened Deeply by R.A. Cooper
This is a fairly brief and mostly straightforward sci-fi puzzler that’s a bit rough around the edges. As shown in my transcript, there were a decent number of times when the first command I tried wasn’t accepted; fortunately, that was never a problem, as it was easy to figure out the correct command (sometimes thanks to helpful customized error messages). Ideally, though, more synonyms would be implemented, and there’s also the classic “you can’t see any such thing” when examining some mentioned nouns. Interactable nouns, on the other hand, often tend to be capitalized and set off on their own line, e.g. “You see Crate here,” rather than integrated more naturally into the room descriptions. There’s also one puzzle that felt very “read the author’s mind” to me (the placard one), and I would never have solved it without the walkthrough.
My other main point of critique is that I wasn’t emotionally invested in the story. You, the ship’s captain, are coming upon the bodies of colleagues who have been wounded or killed, but there’s no emotion in the descriptions of them, and more often than not their only purpose is to provide you with an item or clue you need to progress. For example:
The dead body of, Lieutenant Yostin, lies on the floor. It looks like his left arm has been severed from his body.
>x yostin
He is wearing his dress uniform and dress coat with pockets.
>x uniform
You can’t see any such thing.
>x coat
You can’t see any such thing.
>x pockets
You check Yostin’s pockets. You find a crumpled piece of paper. It has the numbers “364” scribbled on them. You place it in your pocket. “What the hell is this for?”, you think to yourself.
Clearly the PC knows who this person is, but the presence of his dead body elicits no reaction; nothing would be different if he was, say, a desk, with a drawer you could open and get the piece of paper from.
I did enjoy exploring the ship and working my way through the puzzle chain, and the story had me intrigued. I’d just have liked to see more acknowledgement of the horror of what happened on the ship, and thus be made to feel a sense of the stakes, rather than simply being told about them.
Awakened_Deeply_script.txt (67.2 KB)