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2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Sirius Dream, September 2, 2021Your rescue-pod crashed. The Ensign is dead. Your Lieutenant is wounded, near comatose. Survive.
The urgency of the situation is pressed upon you immediately. There are no McGuffins, there is no time for distractions and herrings of any colour would not survive in this atmospher.
Your pod has crashed on an unknown planet. Your crewmates are incapacitated. Survive.
This is the immediate urgency Distress puts you in. No promises, no McGuffins. Survive, without even any herrings to eat.
There's a very cramped, dark atmosphere to this game. the contrast between the wide open yet inaccessible desert landscape around your tiny circle of light makes it truly unnerving to leave the initial crash site.
You have a wounded crewmate who needs care and protection, but you know that you have to leave to search rescue.
I was torn by this situation, truly feeling the dilemma as the player. I scuttled around the crash site for many turns and tried to leave everything as safe as I could before venturing out toward...?
All the way along this grim adventure, things keep happening that are outside of your control. When played according to the game's standards (instead of following a walkthrough), this means losing (dying) more than once. I very strongly recommend doing it this way. Each playthrough will give you new information, be it on the background of the mission, or just on the timing of events. It's worth at least one or two playthroughs to get the details on your spacecraft's unexpected detour into this planetary system.
While on this topic: it's also worth taking your time out-of-game to search for the names of your crewmates in an encyclopaedia of your choosing, and then running to the nearest library...
The biggest difficulty with the puzzles is that the entire game is timed. SAVE on important breakthroughs and expect to run through a few times. RESTORE or (preferably) RESTART gives you the peace of mind to experience the story to the fullest. I still recommend that you play the game straight through a few times, regardless of the outcome.
A very immersive scifi thriller.
- Pinstripe (Chicago, Illinois), December 30, 2020
- Edo, August 13, 2020
- Cory Roush (Ohio), June 20, 2017
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Short and sweet scifi shipwreck story with some user constraints, February 3, 2016I played this Hugo game on Gargoyle. This game was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY award in 2005. You play a woman who just crashed on a strange planet and must survive. It feels like a shipwreck story, in a good way.
The game is very constrained. WAIT is disabled as a command! There are only ten locations, and only 4 of them have anything interesting; out of those four, two have exactly one item and one action you need to do.
I didn't like this game at first, for those reasons, but after I played it, the story stuck in my mind. The writing is descriptive and evocative, the items are well-described and creative. It is a game much better than the sum of its parts.
- Janice M. Eisen (Portland, Oregon), January 14, 2016
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 1, 2016
- Thrax, March 12, 2015
SPAG
[...] the game is tiny -- slightly more than ten rooms, most of which you run by in a rush, but it manages to unwind an intricate plot with an ending, which manages both to be immensely satisfying and to neatly tie up all loose ends. And it's not too wordy, either -- but the reticent descriptions are just long enough to create a truly creepy atmosphere. The puzzles also are set up with a minimum of items to manipulate, yet they are both challenging and logical.
-- Valentine Kopteltsev
- deathbytroggles (Minneapolis, MN), February 8, 2013
- tjg92, January 31, 2013
- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), April 16, 2012
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), June 13, 2010
- Grey (Italy), January 7, 2010
- DJ (Olalla, Washington), August 4, 2009
- Shigosei, December 6, 2008
- Katt (Michigan), August 30, 2008
- NotVerySubtle, July 31, 2008
10 of
10 people found the following review helpful:
A survival game with notable omissions, July 6, 2008Closely related to the adventure game is the survival game, in which physical puzzles are very appropriate. The writing and tone of this one work well, much as in Snyder's other works. But there are so many holes in the implementation of Distress that it utterly destroys the experience. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)an obvious source of bandages is a dead comrade's uniform, but apparently the dignity of the dead is more important than another's life, or even your own. Other marginal but plausible ideas were disallowed outright, such as (Spoiler - click to show)climbing the arch to attack the monster from safety; a simple re-wording of the "you can't do that" kind of message to a "you try but" kind would have been welcome.
It began to seem to me the author was intentionally trying to lead me astray, describing interesting things at a distance I wasn't allowed to move toward, and stopping me from doing most of anything else. It took the hint system to tell me what should have been obvious: (Spoiler - click to show)the stray spike of metal that gashed my comrade isn't a stray spike of metal, but apparently a still fully-functioning machine.
But when my protagonist attacked a monster with the wrong end of a spike, it completed my loss of respect in this work.
Definitely not recommended for beginners.
(I recommend instead a different work by this author, "Tales of the Traveling Swordsman".)
- tfbk, January 10, 2008
- VK, November 26, 2007
- Wendymoon, October 26, 2007
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