Aisle

5 star: (89) 4 star: (140) 3 star: (65) 2 star: (24) 1 star: (2)

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A beautiful and tragic game, a masterpiece of good experimentation., August 11, 2023

You play an (older?) gentleman doing some late night groceries after a long day. Most of it is pretty mundane and uninteresting, until you see some fresh gnocchi in the pasta aisle. Your mind can only think of the last time you had those, in Rome. Around you, the shelves block your view to the other aisles, and a brunette woman stands a few meters away, filling her trolley with pots of sauce.

And in this aisle you stop your trolley, waiting on what to do next.

Though I never found more than a few dozens by myself/with the French IF peeps, there are over 136 actions producing an ending in this game. 136! Whether you interact with yourself or your environment, there are a lot more you can explore with this very restrained environment.

Even if the experiment of one-action-the-end is truly amusing and insanely entertaining (who doesn't like a treasure hunt for all 136 endings), it is the writing that shines the most in this piece. The game is humourous, and dark, has bits of lightness, and becomes incredibly sordid, it is sad and genuinely touching... It can say so much with so very little. Truly incredible.

Through the endings, a backstory forms around the PC. Or maybe two or three. He had a wife, went to Rome with her, but something happened (death/illness/something else?), and he was left alone. It is not truly clear what happened to his wife, or the PC's involvement in said disappearance/death, but what is certain is the pain and the guilt the PC still feels after all this time (has it be years, by now?), making him unable to form new connections with people, leaving him truly and completely alone. What stays is his fond memory of that trip to Rome and those gnocchi he ate there...

One choice..., June 27, 2022

An interesting idea and some great endings. Some more disturbing than others, but maybe more disturbing that I tried then it was implemented.

After a few plays, you start really thinking of edge cases and find out the author thought of some interesting responses. It gave me the feeling of playing the older games when the parser wasn't rich and you could get stuck in a game and start trying some "off the wall" responses and getting surprised it was implemented.

I have a few more plays in me before I explore the internals to see all the endings.

Short story about shopping for pasta, February 1, 2022

The premise of Aisle is simple:

You're standing in the pasta aisle of a grocery store. You've got one turn. What will you do with your one chance, and what will it reveal about you?

The parser understands numerous commands, and recognizes each with a distinct ending. Some endings are happy, some are sad, some are funny, some are disturbing.

Aisle is a very short story that can be played through repeatedly in rapid succession, with all sorts of contradictory conclusions reached. It's very well done, amusing, and probably worth the small time investment if this sort of game seems interesting to you.

Interesting to Explore, April 11, 2020

As someone who *doesn't* play interactive fiction games, I enjoy this as a way to test out commands. It can be frustrating after a few minutes, but it is pleasant to just see how many endings you can get out of it.

The beginning of the review. But not the only one..., June 18, 2019

New as I am to interactive fiction, I had not heard of this game until recently, nor had I heard of the concept of its genre - you have only one turn in which to input a command, after which the story resets and you can start over, ad infinitum.

Aisle, which is as of this review a 20 year-old game, is an extraordinary piece of writing, and I can see why it has a special place in the hearts of so many. Although the concept is simple, it is executed so brilliantly and with such depth that each repeated turn reveals another layer, and another, until you have not just one story but many in parallel.

There are breadcrumbs placed throughout leading you to more ideas of what to do next, so it's not really a case of just throwing in random verbs to see what sticks - though you can do that if you want, and I think it'd be just as rewarding. There's also a list of commands available out there for the completionists who want all 183 possible outcomes. The true genius, however, lies in how all of those outcomes are woven together - or not together, as the case may be - and the depth of feeling created from every piece as well as the whole.

After playing this game I am curious to try others like it, but I think I will always remember Aisle, decades late to the party as I was. Five packets of Gnocchi.

Literally the game that introduced me to gnocchi, so four stars for that!, April 28, 2019

Perhaps the first serious game that would automatically end after one move. The premise is quite simple as you play an ordinary man in an ordinary supermarket who has stopped in the pasta aisle next to a woman who is also shopping. There are exactly 136 possible moves you can make that produce 136 separate endings. There is neither a puzzle nor a plot, and one would be hard pressed to say this is even a character study, as some of the endings’ portrayal of your character’s history contradict each other.

I do wish there was something more here to unravel, but as it stands this is quite a pleasant diversion thanks to the imagination and quality writing of Sam Barlow. More importantly, Aisle inspired many future authors in experimenting with the genre, including a few entertaining games that mimic this one.

I still come back and play Aisle about every five years. There's just something about the protagonist's world view that makes me smile.

Recommend To All, March 18, 2017

This is another game that is made to be replayed. And the player can choose how many times they want to replay, or how much of the story they want to uncover. I tagged it "mystery-ish" because, while it's not a puzzle game with a mystery and clues in the traditional sense, the player uses the previous play-throughs to know how else they can interact with the setting and, therefore, uncover more back-story and characterization. You put a small amount of effort into the game, and receive an increasingly rich back-story and characterization.

It's a game that can function as an accessible introduction to IF but the beauty of the narrative is for anyone. I consider that I've "played" the game but I haven't yet reached a point where I feel I've "finished" the game. I'd consider it a short game though I haven't yet reached an "end" and I don't know if there is one.

A one-action game with over a hundred endings, February 3, 2016

Aisle is a well-known game with a strange mechanic; you are inside a grocery aisle shopping for food, and you only get one action before the game ends.

One-action games such as Rematch or Pick up the Phone Booth and Aisle started appearing soon after Aisle's publication. It became a mildly popular genre, and still is.

What makes Aisle successful? Part of its success is its specific details; you're not just in any aisle, you're by the gnocchi, and gnocchi remind you of your trip to Italy; the woman by you isn't just a stranger,or is she?

Another reason the game is fun is that the endings contradict each other; the story of who you are and what your past is actually changes based on your decision, so that your one action generates an entire past.

The third reason I think many people enjoy it is the wide variety of moods in the endings, from pathetic to hopeful to violent.

This is a game that everyone should play at least one time.

Interesting and short, but kinda boring, November 29, 2015

I didn't feel very invested in the characters. The behavior and insanity of the protagonist doesn't help with this. I don't feel like I can really figure anything out because the narrator is unreliable, and I don't really feel like the personal experience of the narrator has any relevance to me because I'm not insane. But, most of all, I found the absence of challenges to be the biggest reason for not enjoying this very much.

I play games to have fun, and one of the biggest sources of fun for me is being engaged in solving problems and overcoming challenges. When you take that away from a game, you'd better have a really darn good case for me to want to play this game as opposed to the many, many other games out there that DO have that engagement. This game doesn't provide a good enough alternative to that.

After playing without a guide and figuring out enough of the story, I went through and tried all the commands in the walkthrough. There's certainly some fun in that, with how many different commands are implemented, but it's just not structured in a way that makes it interesting. The lack of a goal makes it particularly problematic.

This game reminds of Her Story. You have to piece together what is going on by watching short video clips. I think Her Story is basically a better version of this game because it actually has a goal and actually has a flow and pace to it. Stuff changes in the "meta" game as you discover important bits of information. Having, at the very least, a meta layer might've made Aisle more interesting for me.

All of that aside, it's quite short and you can play it in the space of an hour. This, alone, is it's most redeeming quality (and I don't mean that in the sense of "it's great it's short because it SUCKS"). It gives you a complete, fully-realized, unique experience all in the course of an hour.

I give this three stars because, despite my lack of engagement with it, it was short and unique. I would recommend this, because what do you really have to lose with a game this short?

An Incredible Piece of Experimental Game Design, March 23, 2015

Aisle is such a simple and well executed idea that absolutely everyone in the IF community must have been kicking themselves when it came out that they'd not have thought of it sooner.

Basically, Aisle was the first "one move" text adventure. The game gives you a very simple set-up - you are standing in the aisle of a supermarket, then asks you to perform one action at which point the game will end. This may seem like it has the potential to run into gimmickry but the way it "plays the player" works so well that I can only refer to it as a one of the most inventive games I've ever played.

The endings range from the absurd, funny, mundane to the moving, some of which are exceptionally well written and others which aren't so, but it's the way the game forces the thought process in finding the endings which is what makes the game so great.

At first while thinking of different actions and endings to take, the game seemed rather cute and I began by thinking of pretty standard things, but as I went on I began to think of darker and darker things (not necessarily in an "immoral" way, just in a "wow, did I really think that?" kind of way), some of which I was hesitant to even type in to the interface not only in anticipation of how the game would react but also because I didn't want to admit I'd thought of anything so disturbing. It also becomes hard to drag yourself away from the game. In one session in this game I spend about an hour and a half thinking of endings and came out feeling emotionally drained and guilty about the way my mind works.

Aisle isn't the cute, gimmicky game I originally pinned it down as at all. It's a way of letting you explore how your mind works in a completely innocuous situation within the anonymity and detachment of the artificial world and that is disturbing as hell. I spent my time afterwards wondering whether or not that's how I would really react with no social inhibitions and whether or not the human condition does have these repressed natural thoughts about both ourselves and others which games allow us to enact out in a safe space. And the beauty and/or blunt callousness of which some of the endings are written only made this worse.

Either way, Aisle is such a fantastic experimental piece and a remarkable artistic achievement. Despite it's seemingly simple concept, it's a far deeper and more nuanced piece of game design than I originally thought on hearing about it. In fact, it's one of the most ingenious and creative pieces of game design in any game I have ever played.

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