I feel like this is a little big for a comp game, or maybe I’m just bad at it. I feel like I was progressing, but had no idea how far I was from the end before I hit my time limit. Other impressions after the jump.
This is a game about the post-apocalypse. The game allows you to choose your character’s motivation and special skill, then drops you in to a survival scenario. Your starting situation depends on your motivation. It also lets you select difficulty, though what this actually affects is not clear. The major hook of the game is that your character can take on stress. As the character becomes stressed, spores in his/her immune system will slowly start to take over and kill you, so some way to manage the character’s mood is necessary.
I played the game on Normal. My initial character choice was “find food and water” and “psychopath,” but psychopath turned out to be not so useful as there was no way to “destress.” After failing to make any progress I switched to the “researcher,” “monk” setup, which seemed much easier to manage, since the monk can “meditate” to lower stress levels.
I also found a strange bug that allowed me to continually lower stress levels, though it may have just been a poorly documented feature. As the researcher, you can motivate yourself by going to the break room and making a cup of tea or hot chocolate. Later on in the game, you encounter a kitchen in a ruined restaurant, and I was somehow able to make livegiving destressing tea and chocolate there as well, even though the tea and other items aren’t included in the room description.
There are a few unusual verbs, though sometimes they do not work right. I found this exchange really amusing:
>unclog
What do you want to unclog?>drain
The drain isn’t wearing any clogs!
I like the robustness of the game, and even though the post-apocalypse trope is well-worn, it has an interesting hook with the stress levels on the character. But it has some glitchy bits as you can see, and once I got to a certain point, near the end of my time with the game, I couldn’t figure out what else to do or how to actually solve the game, or indeed how close I might have been to doing so. The area that you cover walking is really immense with lots of different rooms, and the way to navigate them is very circuitous. It’s also often not clear what, if anything, in any given room allows an affordance. I can’t really recommend it until it gets another pass for general playability.
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