Fail-Safe

Baf's Guide

A brief game with a novel premise that it would be disastrous to describe. This work plays some interesting games with the player/player-character/parser identities. It also turns off meta-verbs, so be prepared for the fact that you won't be able to save and restore. The game is so brief, thought, that it probably won't matter much. Definitely worth a try.

-- Emily Short

SPAG
This is possibly the strangest piece of IF I've ever encountered...
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

Suspended's cynical little brother, January 11, 2010
Completely by accident, I played Fail-Safe in the same week that I played the Infocom classic Suspended. Fail-Safe is essentially Suspended's more cynical little brother. In both games, the PC is immobile and completely dependent on NPCs for sensory input, movement, and manipulating objects. Both are also set in science-fiction worlds where a massive calamity has just occurred, and the PC has to walk the NPCs through repairs that they have trouble describing and can only dimly understand.

Fail-Safe is very short, and as mentioned elsewhere, does not permit saves or restores, which is less painful than it might sound. Once you have figured out the basic plan of the game, you can quickly get back to the part where the crucial decisions are made (and where the game's black humor really shows itself). You'll definitely want to replay a few times to make sure you get all the endings. At one point, there's an unfortunate guess-the-verb problem, but for the most part Fail-Safe is entertaining, well-written, and definitely worth playing.

Innovative and Polished, July 9, 2010
This was one of the first games I played on my return to interactive fiction. I count myself lucky to have picked it first. Fail-Safe is very short, often confusing, and experiments with the player/protagonist relationship in interesting ways. It's a fascinating brief work that really only could work as IF, and when you finish it, you'll want (or in my case, _need_) to play it again. You'll understand when you get there.

Perfect IF, March 26, 2008
What a great game. While I can imagine a straight fiction based on the same concept, this is a perfect example of a story that cries out to be interactive. The only reason it misses out on five stars in my book is that the endgame becomes slightly repetitious. However the game as a piece, as a whole, is IF born to be IF. Highly recommended.

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