Spaceship!

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Pleasant puzzle romp, March 14, 2010
This game bills itself as an attemp to write the best group-authored game ever. Now, if you're like me, this tagline is enough to put you off right there and then. I've seen too many well-meaning newbies putting forth their own attempts at the best game ever. At best, such games are tasteless. At worst, they are dismal.

So it was a pleasant surprise for me to start enjoying this game very early on.

This is a simple puzzle-romp, rather light-hearted in tone despite the urgency of the situation - it's probably best compared to Hollywood Hijinx, even though the settings are completely different. Simple premise, lots of puzzles, light-heartened tone. It's not as clever or as original or as creative as Hollywood, but it's quite, quite a pleasant romp.

The setting is simple as to be almost boring - you're a captain in a ship in which something has gone wrong. Go and fix your ship, before you run out of oxygen (a time-limit, but a relatively lax one - it enhances urgency without getting in your way. A nice compromise). In these days where plot and stories are all the rage, it was a surprise to see people trying to make "the best group game ever" with such a thin plot.

Nevertheless, there is more to text adventures than plot - just think of Zork. And the authors have filled the ship with enough background information to make it worth exploring. Red herrings abound, but rather than feeling gratuitous, they feel as though they were put there to enhance the atmosphere. They work.

The game is carefully coded. I did have a couple of issues, namely when trying to set the toilet to "kill" (yes, the game has a certain dry wit that might not appeal to everyone, but made me chuckle more than on- twi- many times), whereupon the game asked me which toilet did I mean, the toilet paper, the toilet water, or whatever. But this is an exception in a game where disabiguation issues have been very carefully polished. The very first puzzle, which involves similarly-named objects, is made very pleasant to solve because of this; you don't have to specify which *whatever* you mean, because although you COULD mean the other one, it's OBVIOUS you mean that one.

This first puzzle sets the tone for the entire game, puzzlewise. Puzzles are carefully done, so that they are amply hinted without making you feel as though you're not actually achieving anything. They require creative thinking at times, but are not absurd to the point of... well, of Monkey Island 2's monkey wrench puzzle, or Simon the Sorcerer 2's hush puppies puzzle.

The game almost seems made for finishing in one sitting. The pleasant writing, the atmosphere of the ship, the nature of the puzzles, make playing "Spaceship!" a nice experience one just breezes through.

It was unfortunate that the very last part of the game seemed to be rather more sloppy. Once I left the spaceship and went into space to continue fixing what I had to fix, it seemed that the quality of writing dropped. So did gameplay - the only instances where I had to struggle with the parser was when I was trying to fix the engines from outside.

Speaking about the writing, it would be expected, from a game with many different authors, that the style would be hap-hazard. Not so. It's cohese, and you'd think all of the text had been written by a single person. The same goes for the puzzles, which, asides from being well-coded, go along the same lines. The game as a whole is surprisingly cohese.

There are advantages of having a group make a game. Beta-testing is practically built in. Although the outside of the ship, as I said, is much more sloppy than the rest of the game, for the most part the parser understood what I wanted it to understand, and sometimes a bit more. Whether I over-simplified a command or over-extrapolated, the game always knew what I meant. Kudos to the authors.

I can't say that Spaceship! is the best game ever. I can't even say it's the best group-authored game ever because a) I've yet to play all group-authored games and b) I personally enjoyed "Across the Stars" (two authors, so I guess it counts as a group) more than "Spaceship!", because it's a little more plot-heavy and basically more my style.

But I can say that this is a game well worth playing. It's been rather low-profile ever since it was released. Well, I think it deserves a little recognition. It's sleek, it's fun, it's cohese, it's well coded. Here's hoping the authors get more ambitious, story-wise, on their next project.