Focal Shift by Fred Snyder
At first, Focal Shift seemed rather foreboding to me. The map felt cramped, yet all avenues of exploration were quickly shut down. There’s nothing to do in the garage. The bureaucrat won’t help me. I can’t hack the drone because I don’t know the password. And so on. But this perception soon changed. I realised that I didn’t need to know a password, but only needed to guess one and then the solve the resulting puzzle. And all the puzzles in the game turned out to be carefully gated. Solving A clarifies that you now have to go to person X to solve B. Solving B clarifies that you now have to go to location Y to solve C. And so on. It’s very streamlined. It’s quite easy too. The game doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to the two hacking games – those you have to learn to solve through trial and error – but otherwise it make it very clear what you’re supposed to do at each point. I breezed through it.
The story is fairly cliché for a cyberpunk hacking game, although the ending is mildly surprising. I liked the ability to hack the owl and do something smart with it. Overall, a nice game, fun, not groundbreaking, but very competent.