Retool Looter by Charm Cochran
Playtime: 1 hour 20 minutes
This made me want to talk about:
- Counterfeit Monkey is listed on IFDB as an inspirations for the game, which makes a lot of sense gives this game features a wordplay mechanic where you can reverse specific nouns present in the environment (i.e., you could turn a LIAR into a RAIL). To compare on just one element, I really enjoyed the scope of this game.[Prepares to dodge thrown projectiles, but] I always found Counterfeit Monkey bigger than I wanted it to be: SO many options that I had to use more of my brain than I wanted just keeping track of words I had encountered and how to spell them, which left me with less processing to enjoy the plot, characters, or other elements of the game. Ymmv, but I thought limiting to just anadromes was a good choice for the scale of this piece.
- This kind of wordplay invites existential questions about why the parser’s specific phrasing is of cosmological significance (e.g., why can the device treat “oatmeal” as “oats” but it can’t treat a “dumpster” as a “bin”), but given the limited scope of the game it didn’t come up too much
- I enjoyed Kay’s verbal tic
- I appreciated the quality-of-life features, like the list of agents to rescue (although I kept thinking the plot would reveal why there was a gap in the list [perhaps a surprise agent to rescue?] but that did not happen), and hints from Kay’s conversation (at a few points it provided hints I didn’t really want, e.g., telling the player directly when they find Mac).
- Overall the game is just well implemented and polished, and felt pretty frictionless 90% of the time.
Notable line: I quite enjoyed the increasingly implausible reasons that the player character refuses to reverse any other agents: “Besides, you know [Mac] would insist on de-reversing the other rescued agents, regardless of the rules about creating life. He has his roguish image to maintain, after all, and you just don’t have space for that kind of energy on a mission so delicate.” and “At this point, it would be too much work to catch Neil up. You might as well just finish the mission on your own.”
completely irrelevant digression about similarities between games by the same author
Subjectivity alert, but in ruminating on whether I thought this was “entirely unlike anything [the author has] written before,” I was getting vibes of:
-
Studio - in the thoroughly implemented kitchen and ability to carry a knife around (although I didn’t need to stab anyone)
-
Gestures Towards Divinity - in the concept of people becoming inanimate objects
Of course I’m influenced because I know what else Charm has written (has there ever been a 100% blinded IF event? I think that would be fascinating for several reasons, although perhaps also impractical)
My one fervent wish:
I would have loved if the ending was expanded to include 1 or 2 more scenes—it felt a bit cramped/rushed. I want to reunite with Kay and make sure she’s OK! (especially given that the game opens with the PC together with Kay, it would give a pleasing feeling of symmetry to end that way, too). I wouldn’t mind seeing a brief entertaining reveal of the rescued agents either. And maybe some explanation of any consequences from the PORTS incident [do I feel guilty, does anyone else have any relevant anecdotes to share, etc]).
Overall, A well-scoped, cleanly-implemented puzzler with a fun word-play mechanic.
wolfbiter transcript retool looter.txt (138.0 KB)
Gameplay tips / typos
Long time readers of this space will know I am an enthusiastic booster of hints and walkthroughts. This game doesn’t ship with a walkthrough. I got through OK, but I did spend some time feeling stuck right at the end. Accordingly, here’s some invisiclues-style hints for the [name of location] beach (you will feel that you are very near the end when you get here).
-
Have you checked your inventory? Maybe something you have had for a while but not used?
-
Yes, I’m talking about the emergency kit.
-
Have you tried reversing both items in the kit? What happened?
-
Hmm, so we have the ethically-fraught PORTS, and a GREEN LOOP and a RED LOOP. Have you tried reversing these?
-
This is where I just kind of spent a while thinking . . . are there any words that suggest themselves as useful and using a lot of those letters? We’re on the beach, so one certainly imagines sailing away . . .
-
Eventually, the key thought may occur to you that you want a SLOOP. This can be created by reversing plural POOLS.
-
But once you’ve done that, you will find you need to get it into the water somehow. What would be useful would be . . .another POOL. Honestly I’m not totally sure how this happened, but the first time I had 1 loop as a LOOP and the other as a POOL, and then reversed the POOL, it generated another loop (blue), leaving one pool that I could still reverse into the original loop. Thus giving 3 loops total (red, blue, green). This will let you make two of the loops into POOLS, make the SLOOP from those two, and still have the third loop to make into a POOL afterward which will appear under the SLOOP, connecting it to the ocean.
-
Finally, try ENTER the sloop.