Ratings and Reviews by Kim Ahmad
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Surprisingly amusing, more than meets the eye, September 12, 2012This game come off initially as a sort of stripped-down, nostalgia piece. However, it conceals a fair bit more gameplay, and a fair bit more clever gameplay than it initially seems. Some of the puzzles are downright challenging, and most require patience and extremely careful attention to detail. Most importantly, though, the game is really quiet funny. The writing is crisp and hilarious, even with throw-away jokes or "error" messages. I wouldn't count it among the greats of emotionally moving IF, but it's a wild, fun ride and definitely worth a play.
Highly satisfying short play, September 11, 2012Although it often feels like one-room escape games have been done to death, every so often an original take on the idea comes along, and this is such an original take. The puzzling is fun and, for me at least, hit the sweet spot of feeling just challenging enough, but not at all frustrating. Mastering the commands was surprisingly satisfying. I can't really think of anything to fault the game for, except perhaps the maddening nature of wondering where that last 5% of the score could have come from! Also worth noting: there is a fair bit of intricate non-dictionary typing in this game, so it may not be ideally suited to some alternative input methods.
Meh?, February 21, 2011It's a weird experience to have such a flat response to the work of someone whose games you normally like so well, and to a game that caused such a splash of interest (also to a game with such an interesting title). However, while I liked the concept of Heliopause quite a bit, and a lot of the imagery was beautiful, I wound up not really enjoying the gameplay experience a whole lot.
A lot of it feels to me as if it were done on a dare rather than out of an attempt to make a compelling game. There's a great deal of customization, which do show of the flexibility of the tools and do sort of prod authors to think in new ways about what interactive fiction could look like. As other reviewers have mentioned, there's even an attempt to make a non-annoying maze -- something which worked for many people (but not really for me). However, in some ways, the game feels like a collection of these things. It's not without story, but the way the story is executed seems more at the service of showing these things off than building engagement.
The distance mentioned in other reviews is at least part of the issue for me -- you never feel very personally engaged with the game. However. there's more to it than that. There were more undefined objects than the usual Plotkin game, some of which were incredibly obvious ones to try to interact with, and this hurts the gameplay and the sensation of depth for sure. I spent a lot of time "guess the verb"ing, even in some cases where the verb the game wanted was one of the basic IF game verbs, because it's so seldom apparent when these do and don't apply. The "maze" was certainly less confounding than many mazes, but it was also very nebulous (pun intended) and poorly defined and I didn't feel like my actions had any relationship whatsoever with my "solving" it -- in fact, I know that understanding and thought had nothing to do with it, because I just did random actions and boom, it was solved. I don't think I built an understanding of what was going on there at all. And there were a lot of times where the game's attempt at hinting things to me clouded rather than enlightened things. The sum of all of these plus "driving" using a totally new system of controls is that it was always very front-and-center that you're manipulating a construction -- I never achieved any degree of immersion in the story at all.
And because it's often the case that these days one of the foremost questions is whether or not the game is accessible to new players (outreach being on everyone's minds lately), this is kind of the polar opposite of that. Now, I don't think making a game to appeal to dedicated players is a bad thing, but I think that this game will be lost on all but the most patient and forgiving players, and that most of what it has to offer is just turning conventions on their head. It's almost designed to specifically narrow the audience as much as possible. Not so much an in-joke, in that there's no joke in it, but definitely the dramatic equivalent. I don't know if that's a horrible thing, but it did stick out to me, especially as I was hoping that the unusual theme would be useful in order to draw in some of my friends who aren't bowled over by their internalized stereotypes of what IF covers.
It sounds like I really hated this game, mind you, and I didn't. I don't think it's horrible, and there are interesting things about it, although I do think that its ratings and buzz have been exaggerated by the reactions of die-hard community members who got into its newness and/or authors who were interested in the implementation. There are things to like about this game. I just came out of it with an overall, "Meh," which really surprised me.
Concise, with a lovely, dry wit, February 14, 2011I think that I'm going to have to add this to my collection of "gateway games," with which to introduce new players to IF. It's a quick play, reasonably well-hinted, with built-in hints available that should minimize frustration. Almost all puzzles have multiple solutions and yet the same objects can be used to solve multiple puzzles, so there aren't a whole pile of red herrings left around. However, aside from just being, as described, a well-designed game that works, it's a barrel of fun to play, if you enjoy its dry wit. It's very well-written, and I think one of the only reasons it's not up for a best-writing XYZZY (other than that I didn't get around to putting in nominations, to be fair) this year is that its light-hearted writing is more fun than evocative, per se. The story is engaging, and many of the responses brought a smile to my face. It's also very rare that I'll play a game multiple times, but I'm keen on trying to play through this one again looking for an alternate ending. Overall, I recommend this one quite a bit.
Sufficiently makes its point, could have been more rewarding, May 6, 2010I just finished Fate my first time through, and I thought it was an interesting game that makes some interesting points and is definitely worth playing.
I did feel both that the game forced binary choices when there were other available options, however, and that the choices didn't feel like they had as much of an impact as I'd liked because the game plays so much like a game. By that, I mean that you don't worry about killing the aliens in Space Invaders because it's a game, it's set up, and that's what you do. This game is obviously more developed than Space Invaders, but I some of the NPCs were presented as transparent obstacles in the same way. Only a few choices really had an impact for me, and I think that more could be done to both give you a chance to develop your own character and to develop empathy toward the other characters.
As such, even though I'm aware of the existence of other endings and I can think of the points where I might have made things move differently, I'm not really compelled to play again and try to play it differently. I imagine that it has a certain degree of replay value for those who are, but that didn't really work for me. (I am wondering to what degree you can make the plot advance without making the choices I made, but not quite enough to replay.)
Still, it's a neat concept, and executed well enough to get the idea across.
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