Clearly I have experienced a slowdown in playing and reviewing. I had some social occasions that took away the evening time in which I can play, and then my daughter got ill and kept us awake at night with coughing fits, which meant that I ran out of mental energy. Still, I’ve played 2,5 games that I haven’t yet written reviews for, and so here we go with:
A Long Way to the Nearest Star by SV Linwood
If one of the aims of the early sections of a piece of IF is to prepare the reader’s expectations for the rest of the game, then A Long Way to the Nearest Star cannot be judged a full success. Everything was so smooth, nice, accessible and pleasant – despite the premise of having to explore an abandoned space ship – that I didn’t realise that I was actually playing a relatively tough puzzle game. I don’t mean ‘old school tough’, but nonetheless requiring a solid amount of lateral thinking and especially a solid amount of thoroughness. I was under the mistaken impression that the paths I needed to tread would be clearly marked; and so I resorted to the hints quite early, because I thought I had simply overlooked something. Instead, I had not been thorough enough in my attempt to solve the game’s puzzles. (To be specific, I had too easily assumed that the energy stone was only for detecting security devices, and had not tried it in the garden.)
In fact, this kept tripping me up. I consulted the hints numerous times because I wanted to see all of the story and I was looking at a list of at least ten other competition games I wanted to play. Almost every time, I could have easily solved the problem if I had only spent the time required to be thorough. I’m talking about simple things, like clicking the terminal in every room. Was it just me and my lack of mental energy? Or was it also the choice interface? A Long Way to the Nearest Star is very close to a parser game, but with an undeniably more cumbersome interface – it reminded me of Lux in that respect. Typing ‘n.s.w.ne’ is simply a lot less work than locating the correct link for going to another location four times. I suspect that one of the reasons I couldn’t fully get into the game as a puzzle game is that the interface was a little to slow to make thoroughness feel like anything less than a burden. And this was exacerbated as the inventory filled up with more stuff and the paths through the space ship grew longer. Having said that, the puzzle design was in fact solid.
Now even though A Long Way to the Nearest Star is a puzzle game, the real reason to play it is certainly the interaction with the one NPC who is present, the maverick AI, and the story that unfolds as we investigate the space ship and talk to them. I’m usually critical of revealing story through audio logs, taped videos, data pads, and so on, since those all make the story something of the past rather than the present in which the player is acting. But SV Linwood makes the very smart choice of telling most of the story through such past-facing devices (because this is easy), but then making them relevant to the present by making them relevant to both our assessment of the AI and the AI’s self-assessment. We don’t just care about the past, but also about the effects of revelation.
The revelation that makes us reinterpret the fictional situation, known to criticism by the fancy term of anagnorisis, is a classic element of both tragedy and comedy. What I especially like about A Long Way to the Nearest Star is that it keeps us in suspense for an extraordinarily long time about whether it is a tragedy or a comedy. The insane AI tropes are well-known enough that we suspect from the beginning that our digital friend may be a killer. But we’re far from sure. And there’s a smartly written string of revelations that keeps us on edge, that makes moral judgement hard, and then grants us and extra big sigh of relief when we find out that the game is, in the end, a comedy, a work of reconciliation. Things may not play out that way, but the game can only be a tragedy if we do not arrive at the perfect level of knowledge; if we mistake the penultimate anagnorisis for the ultimate one. Which is not a tragic structure, but an ironic one. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, I’ve been reading Anatomy of Criticism lately and it shows, perhaps not to my advantage.)
I ended up thoroughly enjoying the game, especially for its central character and plot. A very easy recommendation.
(One final note: the board game didn’t render correctly in the latest Firefox for Linux. But I managed to interpret the mangled lay-out correctly and defeat my opponent anyway!)