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version 12 includes post-IFComp bugfixes.
Story file (version 12)
For all systems. To play, you'll need a glulx interpreter - visit Brass Lantern for download links.

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Rover's Day Out

by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman profile

Science Fiction
2009

Web Site

(based on 16 ratings)
1 member review

About the Story

Three hundred years ago, the Brazilian Space Agency discovered a rocky exoplanet only 38 light years from Earth. With a surface temperature of 1200 Celsius and nine times Earth gravity, it's hardly the sort of place you'd take your dog walkies. Most days.

Game Details

Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 1, 2009
Current Version: 12
License: Creative Commons
Development System: Inform 7
Baf's Guide ID: 3209
IFID: 417B9626-8635-4451-90F5-D082E01547FA
TUID: jf5zkjj3jqfllwcn

Awards

1st Place - 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2009)

Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 2009 XYZZY Awards

Editorial Reviews

The Onion A.V. Club

It’s an engrossing science-fiction experience to rival the genre’s best short stories.
See the full review

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Member Reviews

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Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 1
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant ontological SF story with a disappointing on-rails ending, November 17, 2009
by sneJ (San Jose, California)
The first 3/4 of "Rover's Day Out" is truly excellent; one of the best IF games I've ever played (though I haven't really played through the whole canon of modern IF.) Unfortunately the climactic scene and endgame were a real letdown.

"Rover" is a very 'meta' game, with several levels of reality superimposed on each other. As you almost immediately discover, the character you play is not really a person, and the prosaic apartment you wake up in is not really the clichéd waking-up-in-your-apartment trope. The meta-layers involve a good deal of fun poked at the idea of interactive fiction, and there were several jokes during the introductory phase that made me (literally) LOL.

This introduction trains you for the main task of the game, and in this phase things get weird. In a good way -- it's rather mind-stretching and eerie in the same way as a good Philip K Dick or John Varley story. Every place and item is simultaneously two different things, and the layers of reality begin to fray and tangle up with each other, but you have a job to do and you do it. This was pure gold for me, and I felt simultaneously as though I were reading a really engrossing SF short story, while also realizing that this was an experience that couldn't be duplicated in any other medium. (It would totally not work at all with graphics of any kind.) The puzzles were not too hard but kept my mind working, and the characters were very well-drawn.

The game's problems come with the situation you end up in after you complete the game's primary task. At this point you are trapped and have to escape, and the narrator's voice constantly reminds you that you have to escape, but as it turns out there is not really any way to escape by your own actions. (I had to read the walkthrough to figure this out, after struggling with this scene and restoring many times.) It's really a puzzle with no solution, and all you can do is draw out the struggle before the blatant deus ex machina that leads to the last scene. There are some amusing situations here (the repair droids get in some great lines) but it wasn't worth the frustration.

There is an endgame that involves pretty much nothing but conversation, and IF has not yet attained the level of parser that makes conversation worthwhile. (Disclaimer: I haven't played "Galatea" yet.) This part again felt like it was running on rails, with the other characters just waiting for me to recite the correct stock phrases that would advance the story. In the end there was one last puzzle that, again, I couldn't figure out and had to consult the walkthrough for. (The acting also took a turn for the worse here.)

I initially rated the game five-stars while halfway through it, and I'm reluctant to lower that even though the rest of the game was such a letdown. The good parts are still really, really good, good enough that I'm still thinking them over and savoring their atmosphere. The game really is a must-play; only adjust your expectations downwards for the final scenes.

If you enjoyed Rover's Day Out...

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Games with Impossible-to-film moments by aaronius
I'm looking for games that demonstrate the power of text-based games. Games with sentences that would make developers of 3D games weep, like "The army of ten million robots marched over the liquid landscape," or "She concealed her anger...

Fast-paced action scenes by Juhana
Fast-paced action is something that's notoriously hard to do in IF where waiting for player's input necessarily pauses the game every turn. Which games have succeeded in creating action scenes that convey the sense of urgency, danger and...

Story-based games by Peter Pears
I'm looking for games with an actual story that develops as the game progresses, with or without twists (too many games have nothing but backstory, or play through only a minimal part of a big story, or the story simply does not develop...




This is version 8 of this page, edited by Juhana on 5 January 2010 at 3:23am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item