IF Comp 2009: Interface

This was all right. When it said it was a “deliberately old school romp,” I was worried I’d get a lot of instant kills and have to save a lot, but it turned out I couldn’t really die or get stuck in this game. I saved a lot anyway, just in case something screwed me, as I figured a deliberately oldschool romp indeed would.  Anything that might contain real spoilers is below.

The puzzles such as they were were easy. I finished it in less than an hour with max score and seemed to basically stumble on how to do everything correctly.

Some descriptions aren’t real evocative, such as the “boring living room.” But the implementation is nice with pretty much everything I try to examine actually existing in the world.  I keep thinking the game might have been more evocative if it took place in something other than a house with a secret lab though I’m hard pressed to figure out precisely what.  Oh, and I guess it has a feelie! I just now, after finishing it, realized that. It wasn’t really important to finishing the game to have this.

At first I thought it was weird that Gilby wasn’t bothered that I had his keys, but he does eventually realize, and takes them, which is a good touch.

One weird thing: “You can see property tage here.” Wait, what is property tage? “You see nothing special about property tage.”  …Um, thanks.

Since I thought the game was easy, and there was no ‘amusing,’ I checked out the hints after finishing it.  A few hints seem to hint at things I never encountered such as “how do I give the doll to the girl?”  Turns out the author put some red herring hints as a joke.  Not really all that funny – what about just having context-sensitive hints like other games I’ve seen?  I guess it would require more programming but would be less condescending.

I liked it over all but it wasn’t spectacular, maybe because it was really pretty short or there was no real ah-ha moment in the game. I think the thing that stood out the most was the weird descriptions initially of being inside the robot and how you were trying to move but couldn’t figure it out. That was pretty neat.