Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home

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This is just...gorgeous. The writing is incredible -- your fantastical solar-sail ship feels familiar, while the places you sail to evoke that thrill of wonder and alienness even though to the player, everything should be equally strange. Playwise, it's a bit of a "hoist sails and find out what happens" interface rather than letting you affect the plot much, but that works perfectly with the premise: you're an explorer just seeing what's out there. This is a game to play for the storytelling rather than the challenge. The puzzles are clever but not particularly difficult and the parser will accept both a wide variety of authentic nautical terms and more landlubber-friendly versions. If you sail, this will be particularly enjoyable, but if you don't you won't be lost at all.

It's mostly a story of pure exploration, but the ending is crisply wistful and satisfying. It has a bit of a Ray Bradbury feel to it -- the nostalgic stories, not the creepy ones.

The only problem I had was that in one situation, I tried multiple ways to get out of a trap, only to find myself suddenly free without doing anything different that I could see. I'm not sure if that was a bug or me doing something slightly different without realizing.

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The goal is simple enough: you’re a restless starfarer with a fine sailing ship, in the mood to get away and see something new, deep in space. And with that, despite the game’s linearity, it satisfies what non-linear games are usually better at: the sense of exploration. If you play these games (in whole or in part) for the sense of discovery, and you avoid linear play out of habit, I urge you to let this game be an exception for you.

The writing is richly evocative without being purple or self-indulgent, and the constant sense of cosmic vista defines the game experience. There is, really, almost nothing else to it.

There are one or two times where I struggled with the game’s verbs (Spoiler - click to show)(the puzzles, such as they are, are mostly about fiddling with sails, and some nautical terms work, and some don’t, and you just have to experiment to see). There is, at one point (I believe) a kind of very important false choice, and that frustrated me a little, but not for long … the game was simply too lovely, too rewarding in its own small way, not to forgive.

It’s a brief jaunt into the wind-and-sail version of space adventure fiction. It’s very nearly a one-room game in practical terms (not entirely, but nearly). It is linear. It is predictable (the ending I got, I saw coming when the story was barely underway). But … it is beautiful, and it is everything it needs to be.

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I really enjoyed this work. It was short and linear, but very creative and the setting was very evocative. Plotkin is quite good at using a few well-chosen strokes of the literary brush to allude to an extensive backstory, while letting the reader fill in most of the details themselves.

The style nods to classic SF of the pulp era -- Jack Williamson's "rhodomagnetics" makes a distinctive appearance early on, and I'm sure I missed many others. In style and tone I was reminded powerfully of both John Clute's Appleseed and the works of Jack Vance. The society of d'Accord is so advanced that the mechanics and time scales of space travel are of no real relevance to the protagonist, and the nautical metaphor Plotkin uses maps very well onto this setting.

And there's a maze. I don't mind mazes as much as some do, but even maze-haters should enjoy this one. The "room" descriptions are well-written and the mechanics are both novel and thematic.

The ending sequence was a nice finishing touch as well -- I won't spoil it here.

Overall, an excellent short work by a master of the art.

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