Detritus by Ben Jackson
Flavor: the PC struggles to survive on a derelict spaceship while piecing together the cause of the devastation
Playtime: 1 hour 54 minutes (normal difficulty)
This is a gripping, very smoothly implemented game. I had to pause my session at one point and it was difficult to tear myself away. It was always well signposted what puzzle I should be working on, and I had no issues getting things to work the way I wanted. (I particularly thought the system of dragging the corpses around was easy to execute, without giving away too much if the player didn’t have a concept in mind). The recycling / fabricating was also really well executed, and expanded the range of items for puzzles, while also making the game more forgiving if someone were, hypothetically, to just be going around recycling everything that’s not nailed down.
The game delivered everything I wanted based on the front matter, including plenty of sci-fi elements and puzzling. The puzzles were not too hard but satisfying (I did enjoy the “look at the functional engine and figure it out). The ending is also a nicely done twist, it really tied together breadcrumbs from the whole game [I had in my play notes, “interesting point of commonality that the PC and GAIL both say they don’t feel like themselves"]. I also found the sequence where the PC recycles themself into a new body felt surprising and impactful.
If I was going to try to think of ideas for improvement, this is minor, but (1) I never really felt much of a sense of PERIL, which I think could fit in this type of game, (2) the resource-management layer felt tuned perhaps slightly easy?
Selected quote:
Overall: a creative, well-honed puzzler raising some classic sci-fi issues
If you like this, you may like [other media]: hmmm, the premise is definitely in the vein of say, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and others, but actually I was most reminded of (warning: major spoiler for the end) Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, for playing around with what kind of bleed through you’d get if trying to run the “software” of a person on a different person’s “hardware”).