Perihelion, by Tim White
Without a doubt, Perihelion has the most unique use of colours I’ve seen to date in a work of interactive fiction. As we play, and the day and time of day changes, the background colours of the game change massively, running through what would seem to be the entire rainbow. It’s a powerful mood-setting device for a weird, poetic game about an alien being in an ethereal world. But having these massive changes happen every single turn was also distracting, at least in my experience. If one adds to that the very unfortunate use of slow timed text, one must reach the conclusion that the way Perihelion is presented does not encourage optimal engagement with the game itself.
The story is simple but fine: a human has crash landed on our alien world and we set out to help them. While the game labels itself (on the Spring Thing website) as a puzzle game, I didn’t find anything that would count as a puzzle: all the options that will help the alien are labelled as such, and at one point one has to wait for the right day before doing an action, but this too is clearly signposted. So one moves through the game’s locations and events without much hindrance.
The best element of Perihelion is clearly the weird world it sets out to describe. There is perhaps an over-reliance on the technique whereby we make something mysterious and poetic by describing it in terms that quite literally defy being imagined (such as the colour choices early in the game); but this game has a better justification than most, because we are looking at the world through the ideas of a life-form that ought to be incomprehensible to us.
I can’t help but feel that Perihelion doesn’t quite succeed at what it sets out to do. But it does manage to convey the strangeness of its world, and that is nothing to be sneezed at.