Rover's Day Out

by Jack Welch profile and Ben Collins-Sussman profile

Science Fiction
2009

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5 star:
(10)
4 star:
(29)
3 star:
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2 star:
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Number of Ratings: 53
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- elysee, May 12, 2023

- Bloxwess (Bellaire, Texas), December 10, 2022

- Brad Buchanan (Seattle, Washington), November 14, 2022

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Good Dog!, October 28, 2022
by Rovarsson (Belgium)
Related reviews: SF

(warning: while I do not spoil any specific puzzles, this review talks about the underlying weirdness, for lack of a better word, of the game)

The start of this game threw me into a wholly unexpected situation. From the (quickly skimmed) blurb I had taken away that Rover's Day Out would be a space adventure of sorts. Instead I got dropped in a fairly generic "my crappy apartment" intro. Complete with an annoying alarm clock waking me up!

That is... Until I started noticing things...

Most obviously, who are those people talking about me as if I were in another room. Am I? I sure can't seem to talk to them or interact with them in any way.

And... What's happening with the status bar? I'm used to glancing up there for confirmation of which room I'm in. This is different though... Some kind of technobabble straight from Enterprise's ship's computer. It's responding to the boring around-the-house chores I'm doing though...

Wait... There are those voices again, talking about me in the bathroom. One's being a prude about looking at me. But no-one's here...

And then the whole thing collapses when I tried to turn on the dryer.

Rover's Day Out is a 2009 game. It feels older though. This kind of confusing layering of player/PC personas reminds me a lot of the turn of the century experiments with the specifics of the IF medium.

The author uses the an AI-simulation to create a rift between the PC's perception, which consists of a recreation of the morning ritual of one of the designers, and the engineers/designers who judge the AI's performance from outside, in the real world.
During the game, the player shifts somewhere between these levels of perception and knowledge. From being confronted with a domestic breakfast situation, I quickly latched on to the simulation context through cues from the game. My knowledge becomes greater than that of my PC. The commands I give still need to be approriate in the PC's perceived reality however. This produces an alienating feeling of both inhabiting the PC and hovering above it. When the simulation-protocols are partially lifted during the endgame, this alienation is enhanced by an even greater disconnect between PC-perception and valid commands.

The fact that I, the player, am able to overhear the engineers talking about my, the PC's, performance broadens the gap even more, even while I'm consciously striving to bridge that gap and stay connected with my PC.

There are a few points where the partial overlap between player and PC is less than perfectly recognized in the game's responses, and sometimes I had a hard time discerning just what level of reality the description I was reading was about. Once I fully grokked the one-on-one relation between simulated and real objects though, the puzzles clicked quite easily and elegantly.

Confusing in a very good way. Must play.

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- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 17, 2022

- nosferatu, July 6, 2021

- Zape, July 12, 2020

- kierlani, June 19, 2020

- Sammel, March 23, 2020

- Bartlebooth, February 17, 2020

- Laney Berry, January 29, 2019

- play_all_day, June 29, 2018

- X, June 4, 2018

- Cory Roush (Ohio), July 3, 2017

- Ivanr, June 6, 2017

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Text-dumps, bad colors, uninteresting characters, March 4, 2017
by Audiart (Davis, CA)

Based on reviews I really wanted to like this game, and gave it a fair try. But it was just one text-dump after another from the beginning. I thought this would abate after the introduction, but it didn't. It was such a chore to try to plow through this rather dry writing that I felt totally unmotivated to explore or solve the puzzles. I was also instantly repelled by the different text colors, and I had no attachment to the characters.

As a fan of golden age science fiction, animal oriented games, humorous games, and metaphysics, I came into Rover's Day Out hoping for a lot. Unfortunately, all I got an uninteresting amateur novel that I had to tap my way through with canned responses.

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- lkdc, February 6, 2017

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Too repetitive, January 20, 2016
by Deboriole (San Diego, CA)

I initially chose this game because it featured a dog. Unfortunately I found the lack of progress too frustrating and I did not complete this game. I don't really care for games that loop... especially if the loop is full of mundane tasks that I didn't enjoy the first time around. I love puzzles, but I felt this game's "puzzles" were more like virtual chores. There were also a ton of bugs which may or may not have been on purpose. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)when I filled the water dish and put it down for Rover, he seemed so thirsty that I picked it up and filled it again. But when I went to put it down, the game said I wasn't carrying it, and when I did "i" it wasn't in my inventory. In the next iteration the water bowl was already full, so maybe it is supposed to be "glitchy" based on the premise that you are building the simulation. I guess this game just wasn't for me. Two stars because I liked the humor.

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- branewurms, December 24, 2015

- Aryore, December 13, 2015

- <blank>, November 21, 2015

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Mid-length sci-fi game with multiple points of view and a dog, August 7, 2015
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

Rover's Day Out is centered on a brilliant idea, which you discover the instant you start playing. Ostensibly, this game is about a morning routine and a cute dog called Rover. However, you soon learn more about what is really going on.

I finished playing this game on parchment, which caused problems with the status bar (which adds a lot of information). Also on parchment, I had a bug where an essential item (Spoiler - click to show)(dog food) disappeared, rendering the game unwinnable. The bug did not appear again when I played through the second time, some months later.

It can be a little hard at times to figure out what is going on, but that is part of the appeal of the game. The game gets progressively more intense, with the later game being especially intense. Plenty of surprises occur as the game progresses.

This game has been ranked in the Top 50 IF of all time, and it deserves its place.

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- chux, May 20, 2015

- Indigo9182, December 21, 2014

- Floating Info, April 3, 2014


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