The Garbage of the Future by AM Ruf
This is a relatively small choice-based puzzle game with many endings that can be collected as achievements. The setting is a lakeside in the dark, where Jake, the third person focal character, is about to illegally dump tonnes of toxic waste from a truck while the truck driver, Bill, is doing absolutely nothing. It’s no surprise that the toxic waste will mutate you into a mindless man-eater, nor that there is already a man-eater lurking about the premises; it’s strongly hinted that this is your predecessor. Tension is added through the danger of the sludge, the approaches of the mutant and some evil bird, and the faulty equipment you’re supposed to be working with, including a flash light that goes out every couple of turns. Perhaps it is possible to achieve a ‘happy’ ending, but I either died or mutated, ending up with 6 out of 16 achievements.
Several reviewers commented on the somewhat clunky interface, and I agree with those. It took me a while to get my bearings. The game never really explains that you’re walking around the truck, and I didn’t realise at first that the many trucks I came across in seemingly very different environments were all the same truck. Then there’s some links that rewrite the screen, some that generate a pop-up, some that give you a little menu of options… it takes some getting used to. Since there is no consistent place for, for instance, directional movement, moving around the map takes a lot longer than it would in a parser game or a choice game with a more structured lay-out. It would have helped if there had been some kind of side-bar with, say, inventory options and ‘wait’, and perhaps also the relevant direction commands. As it is, there’s a lot of unused space on the screen (unless one plays on a phone, I suppose).
Given that it’s a game that requires some replaying to really get a sense of the shape of, a more friendly – that is, a faster – interface would have been a help. As it is, I wasn’t too motivated to try and get to a good ending. But, you now, I got to walk the bottom of a lake as a sludge-created mutant, and that’s fine with me.