Little Blue Men

Baf's Guide

An office game--you're dealing with irritating coworkers, malfunctioning vending machines, and the like--but with twists that send it way beyond the office-game genre. The author calls it a "rushed and uneven mixture of gonzo humor and surreal horror," which isn't entirely inaccurate, but it's still an impressive game--by turns nastily subversive and darkly funny. The ending, in particular, is surprising, and it's easy to miss what the author was really driving at if you don't read carefully. The main problem (and, in my book, the only thing keeping this from a five-star rating) is that it's often hard to figure out what to do next; your motivations are often unclear unless you happen to know what the trajectory of the story is already. NB: it's possible to reach what seems to be an okay ending after about 10 moves, but there's much, much more to the game than that, so if you reach that ending, go back and try again. Has adaptive hints (which you're likely to need). Highly recommended both as a game and as an object lesson in IF theory.

-- Duncan Stevens

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

There's a lot to like about this game. It is written well, and although it doesn't achieve an overall arc, it does contain moments which can be quite moving or frightening. Technically I could find very little for which to fault it, both in its writing and its coding. Its puzzles may have had some unpleasant content, but they were clever and engaging, and generally quite well integrated with the storyline. But for me, it did not succeed as a work of art. Nonetheless, I respect it for being an ambitious but flawed experiment -- I'll take that over competent repetition any day.
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The whole is less than the sum of the parts, May 26, 2008
Mike Gentry is a terrific writer, and specifically a terrific writer for IF: his descriptions are evocative without being longwinded, and his viewpoint character gets plenty of attitude. He is also good at getting the player go to along with actions that seem more and more likely to lead to bad places, just because the curiosity to find out what is going on is so strong.

Little Blue Men shows off all these things to advantage. Unfortunately, it also has a couple of things going against it. One is the puzzle design: this game is genuinely cruel on the zarfian scale, and I had to restart three or four times in order to make sure I had everything I turned out to need in the end game. A few actions aren't clued as well as they could be, either. There are some hints, but they don't go all the way to providing specific instructions if you get stuck, and they're not enough to save you from losing objects you're going to turn out to need. In some games this might not matter so much, but I found the disruptions and replaying annoying precisely because I was so interested to find out what was going to happen next. But then, I tend to think that making the player replay from scratch (except in games specifically designed to be understood this way, such as Varicella or Rematch) is a great way to screw up the pacing of an otherwise gripping piece of IF.

My other complaint is a little more subjective: there's lots of creepiness going on here, and sometimes I start to think that I understand the intended reality, only to have that understanding ripple and become mysterious again. I do not absolutely demand that my stories tie everything up with a nice neat bow, but LBM leaves things a bit more confused than I would have liked.

For all that, though, it's definitely worth playing, especially for horror fans.

If you've ever had a job you REALLY hated..., August 23, 2009
I liked Little Blue Men a lot. I normally can't stand Cruel (on the Zarfian scale) games, but LBM requires so few moves to complete successfully, and has such a small world to move around in, that it didn't particularly bother me.

The puzzles are tightly put together, the atmosphere is well done, and I rather liked plot and theme both. The author (and some reviewers) speak a lot about motivations of the protagonist being different from that of the player, but... I didn't really have that problem. The story puts you in an office that you loathe working in and loathe everyone else who works in, and presumes that you're a little... off. I didn't have that much problem suspending disbelief and cheerfully putting myself in the protagonist's shoes, really. In real life I wouldn't (Spoiler - click to show)kill and drug coworkers, but it's not real life, it's a game, right?

I also didn't have much complaint with the surprise ending. It's a twist, sure, but it seems to fit well enough with the rest of the story for my taste.

Highly recommended for great writing and well-put-together puzzles. You may or may not like the unexplained bits left over at the end, but you'll almost certainly be left with an impression that sticks around for a while.

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