External Links


Browser Edition
This version includes an onscreen map and allows click-or-tap input.
Play this game in your Web browser.
Original Edition
Original competition version.
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Facility Mapping Kit
A mapping template. Print this out so you can draw a map as you play.
To view this file, you need an Acrobat Reader for your system.
Walkthrough
by the author
Walkthrough and map
by David Welbourn

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Inside the Facility

by Arthur DiBianca profile

2016

(based on 55 ratings)
9 reviews

About the Story

Your friend Mike thinks no one can infiltrate THE FACILITY, but you're going to prove him wrong.

A light puzzle game. In the author's opinion, it's totally family-friendly.

(If you're playing the Browser Edition, there's an onscreen map. If you're playing the original edition, make sure to look at the Facility Mapping Kit.)


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle - 2016 XYZZY Awards

13th Place overall; 1st Place, Miss Congeniality Award - 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2016)

46th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2019 edition)

49th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition)

Editorial Reviews

The Breakfast Review
"Inside the Facility" is very much a game rather than a story, a puzzle to be figured out. And it's been pared way down so that the only commands you really need are the four cardinal directions and the ability to wait a turn. On the one hand, this severely limits your ability to interact with the world; on the other hand, this is a game and those are the rules, and it's really more a case of redefining the way the game is played. Not "less", just "different".
See the full review

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(29)
4 star:
(19)
3 star:
(5)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(1)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 9
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Clever, funny, unashamed puzzler with reduced parser, November 16, 2016
by Robin Johnson (Edinburgh, Scotland)

The only commands this game accepts are NORTH, EAST, SOUTH, WEST, WAIT, LOOK and STATUS, with actions like picking things up and giving them to NPCs triggered automatically. This is surprisingly effective, and the game contains a variety of puzzles of different types: lock and key, darkness, bribery, manipulate the NPC, figure out the machine, navigation.

I was initially put off by the request to print off a map to fill in as you go, but found it added to the fun, like solving a crossword, and there are certainly puzzles that would have been both harder and less enjoyable without it.

The author knows how to use brevity of writing to good effect – with such a large map, longer descriptions would have made the game more tiring. But they managed to squeeze every drop of clarity and characterisation out of the one-sentence descriptions. Some characters made me laugh or feel sorry for them, and some I took an instant dislike to.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Completionists, beware!, August 7, 2017
by Cory Roush (Ohio)

Only kidding - completionists will probably love this game, unless they have something important to do and are on a strict deadline. In that case, put this game off until later.

The basic premise is that 130 rooms make up the Facility, and your job is to discover each and every one. At first it seems simple, until you run into the Facility's security clearance system, which only grants you access to new parts of the Facility once you've found a keycard of the corresponding color. From there, the game is a series of fetch quests and minor puzzles, but it's hilarious and cute and the characters, even though you can't interact with them outside of a very limited set of actions, are so endearing.

There's not a lot of story, at least not an overarching one. But about halfway through the game I realized that I didn't need a story, I was just eagerly waiting to fill in the next box on the paper map I was playing along with. (Don't skip out on that part - half the fun is in filling in the squares and eventually gazing down at a fully developed map.)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A great exploration of how far you can go with a limited parser. In a lab., May 10, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.

This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.

If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.

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See All 9 Member Reviews

Inside the Facility on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Inside the Facility appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Some of my favorite games by G. Faregan
In alphabetical order.

A Year on IFDB: The games that have stayed with me by Spike
About a year ago I discovered post-AGT interactive fiction. Since then I've played a lot of great IF games. This list consists of the ones that have stuck with me the most. They're not necessarily the ones I rated the highest immediately...

IFDB Top 100 by Pegbiter
An automatically updated list utilizing an IMDb style Bayes estimator to calculate weighted ratings based on all IFDB ratings. Questions and comments can be placed here....

See all lists mentioning this game

Polls

The following polls include votes for Inside the Facility:

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Puzzles of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best Puzzles in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here...

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible Settings of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best setting in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here...

For your consideration: XYZZY-eligible NPCs of 2016 by MathBrush
This is for suggesting games released in 2016 which you think might be worth considering for Best NPCs in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here will...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 18 of this page, edited by dibianca on 12 February 2023 at 11:00pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page