Absence of Law

by mathbrush profile

Science Fiction
2017

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- aluminumoxynitride, March 10, 2024

- Max Fog, January 25, 2024

- TruePikachu, January 8, 2024

Dhakajack
Review: Absence of Law

This is an ambitious work: multiple levels of interaction, several shifts in player POV, lots of rooms, NPCs, and puzzles. Despite its size, it has been meticulously proofed and tested...

With everything packed into this game, it is amazing that it played as well as it did, and speaks of time spent on making sure that puzzles were clued and objectives clear, both on the part of the author and play testers. I found a couple puzzles either finicky or laborious, but that could also reflect my own self-inflicted difficulties in how I approached them.

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A Colossal Adventure

In the ending acknowledgments, the author mentions that the puzzles are meant to be a sort of greatest hits of their favorite IF puzzles, which is definitely not a bad thing. There’s some well-executed classics here, like assembling parts of a language you don’t quite understand, mixed in with equally pleasing new tricks, like sorting a list of randomly generated objects into categories. Everything in the game is controlled through remote commands and viewed through cameras, which both puts a new spin on things as there’s no traditional inventory management, and eliminates guess-the-verb problems as all of your possible commands are easily listed at any time.

This is not just a puzzle game, though. The story holding it together is fairly slight, but entertaining and well written.

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- elysee, April 24, 2023

- egostat (1st Level, Abyss), April 14, 2023

- rextrex, April 13, 2023

- WorstPunk, April 10, 2023

- VanishingSky (Nanjing, China), December 12, 2022

- rivergrace21 (East Coast USA), September 9, 2022

- Guenni (At home), August 10, 2022

- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 1, 2022

- Next_Stop_Willoughby, December 10, 2021

- nosferatu, May 31, 2021

- William Chet (Michigan), May 21, 2021

- Chin Kee Yong (Singapore), April 6, 2021

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A great blend of future and past, January 26, 2021
by Luihum (Brazil)

Absence of Law is different from your usual IF. Instead of your character in the story being physically present in the game world, DaedalOS, an AI operating system controlling Stygicorp, the lab where the game takes place, also takes the role of the parser.

Even with AI operating systems and brain backup units, the mostly three-character commands bring a feeling of nostalgia.

The story is divided into three main independent sections. The game doesn't seem to have unwinnable states, and there's plenty of easter eggs. The music is one of my favorite aspects of the game.

It is very immersive; even supposedly out-of-world commands have in-world explanations, and nearly all error messages have been replaced with appropriate messages.

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- TheBoxThinker, January 25, 2021

- Andrei Pambuccian, October 23, 2020

- Sammel, July 11, 2020

- okcockatoo, June 15, 2020

- kierlani, May 9, 2020

- Zape, April 28, 2020

- Bartlebooth, February 17, 2020


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