I’m running down to the last few games, and I’ve played a pretty big block of them in the, let’s say, “home stretch.” Bad pun intended, since this is a game about baseball. You play as a baseball fan, and the object of the game is to interfere with a real, historical Cubs game so that the Cubs win.
I immediately thought: this is going to be tricky, because I’m not a big sports fan at all. But, I thought, the game seems well-written, and I really should give it a fair shake.
It starts off pretty promising all things considered. There’s an intro scene where you, as a kid, talk to your mother, then after the little flashback you’re lead in to the game proper, where you are attending a live game as an adult. The game is annotated with little footnotes in case you don’t understand much about baseball, and seems to be full of minutiae if you are actually interested in baseball, like who individual players are and etc. As a historical study of a real event this is very cool and it probably was quite a feat to document a real game so completely as all this.
I solved the sequence of puzzles to get in to the stadium, which involves buying some fan shirts and then getting a ticket from the mysterious stranger that tells you to interfere with the game. I didn’t get much further than this, though I did wander the stadium picking up unusual items.
The game indicates that you should buy a particular T-shirt before going in to the stadium, and then later on you get a marker that you can use to modify the shirt. If you try to go in to the stadium without this shirt, the game will warn you that you need it before proceeding, so that’s fine. But since I couldn’t figure out how to progress once I got in the stadium, and I was wandering aimlessly, I checked the walkthrough and there was apparently some other random item (a tape?) that I missed while I was solving puzzles outside.
I suppose it’s entirely fair to include an old-fashioned cruel puzzle like this, if that’s what you’re going for. But I didn’t have a save file before I had entered and at that point had already sunk quite a bit of time in to the game, so I was pretty disheartened to discover this. I guess I could say this one has some really neat tricks, and does its best to be user-friendly, but in some situations it isn’t as user-friendly as it could be and there are puzzles that will force you to restart. On the other hand, you don’t have to interfere with the game itself until sometime in the 6th inning, so you can probably spend quite a bit of time exploring outside and still manage to win? I personally didn’t figure out how to get the ticket to enter until the baseball game had already started, which I think is built in to the design, but it never warned me about the tape, if that is indeed the thing I needed…
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