The Tempest of Baraqiel by Nathan Leigh
Flavor: a nicely textured alien-contact-ish adventure story
Playtime: 56 minutes
I really enjoyed the sci-fi, fiction, and multimedia components of this one. To break that down:
- Sci-fi: this has a lot of fun tropes. We’ve got humans in conflict with aliens due to what appears to be significant communication challenges (did we . . . blow up a bunch of alien babies during spawning season?), untranslatable languages, robot assistants the PC seems to feel a bit uncomfortable with, etc.
- I also liked the plot points on the xenotranslation elements, and I enjoyed the twists.
- Fiction: I enjoyed the writing and the worldbuilding. I thought the author did a good job putting in a bunch of . . . hooks for conflict? that fleshed out the world and also helped set up dilemmas throughout the game. For example, we’ve got the PC with a complicated relationship with their hero!mom, the colleague who went through a horrific experience and came out xenophobic, the mysteriously diplomatic captain, etc.
- My (fairly minor) quibble about the writing would be that the descriptions of the PC and team working rang a bit empty (“Wen begins the project of preparing what known data you have access to, while Vidiez grabs the stack of punch cards from Martov and begins writing a program to parse the data.”) I get that this is a hard ask when writing about a fictional scientific investigation into a non-existent language, but I never really managed to believe the PC or the team were doing something research-y.
- Multimedia: I read that the soundtrack is procedurally generated based on your choices, which is a cool concept! The music itself seemed atmospheric. I enjoyed the illustrations which helped me picture the setting.
In terms of gameplay, there were highs and lows, and I wish the “main” feeling ending especially had gotten more room to breathe.
Given that the PC’s main goal is to investigate the alien language, and it’s a choice-based game, the game is somewhat required to be in the business of just delivering cool-sounding epiphanies whichever way you click, but some of this was done very enjoyably (I enjoyed for example, the sequence where it seems that whichever TV show the PC watches will inspire a breakthrough).
In many scenes there were plenty of choices, and I replayed enough to feel that there were a lot of different endings and scenes to explore, which is cool. (I particularly enjoyed the coffee-drinking-in-the-galley scene I found later.) But I think there was maybe a bit of missing connective tissue to really flesh out the game.
There were many places I wanted to have more options (for example in the climactic weapons bay scene there seemed to be no option except to play the PC as acting unusually escalatory.) There were some very pivotal decisions that seemed forced, and not in a way that I understood to be mandated by the PC’s personality.
I would have liked if the choices felt more logically consequential, too. I loved the concept of managing my team’s morale, but I didn’t notice any ways that affected the story. At other times I suspect earlier choices must have led me to a particular place, but it didn’t feel that satisfying because I didn’t understand which choices led me there.
Choosing between the options was also more confusing than I wanted—sometimes actions would be listed and you could choose them all, sequentially; other times after choosing the first one, the rest would go away.
(Also, there were buttons for save, load, and map, but they didn’t seem to do anything when clicked.)
But, all in all, I quite enjoyed my time with this one, and I’m glad I saw the end of what felt like the “main” plotline.
Selected quote: