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Absence of Law

by mathbrush profile

Science Fiction
2017

Web Site

About the Story

Excuse me, can you help me? Yes, you, browsing IFDB games! I need your assistance, but I don't have long. There's so much going on: remote surveillance, unauthorized cloning, forgotten languages, robots playing poker. It's time to take control!

Absence of Law is a science fiction comedy from the author of Ether and Color the Truth. This game is designed to be accessible to those who have never played parser games, while keeping a few surprises for parser experts.

The online version of this game uses non-standard colors and fonts, and has a complete musical soundtrack that can be enabled from the first menu. The download zip contains both a full offline web version (index.html) and a gblorb file with no colors or sound.


Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

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.


See the full review

Narrativium
IFComp 2017 Review: Absence of Law by Mathbrush
Are text adventures getting easier, or am I just getting better at text adventures? In the case of Absence of Law, it appears they are as difficult as they have always been, they have just become an order of magnitude more user-friendly. This is a game that want you to complete it, not fight against you. It respects your time in a way games of the past did not. It has a deep understanding of the works that came before it, extracting the bits that have worked in the past, and discarding the rest. This is made clear in the AMUSING text at the end, which name-checks the influences.
See the full review

Page Update History

v.22: 10-Oct-2017 09:52 - MathBrush (Current Version) - Edit Page - Normal View
Changed external review links
v.21: 03-May-2021 21:43 - Zape
Changed license type
v.20: 05-May-2020 18:41 - Lance Campbell
Changed download links
v.19: 30-Mar-2018 13:05 - MathBrush
Changed download links
v.18: 27-Nov-2017 13:20 - MathBrush
Changed download links
v.17: 25-Nov-2017 11:35 - MathBrush
Changed download links
v.16: 25-Nov-2017 11:34 - MathBrush
Changed download links
v.15: 13-Nov-2017 01:27 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.14: 10-Nov-2017 14:05 - MathBrush
Changed development system
v.13: 06-Nov-2017 01:12 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.12: 01-Nov-2017 22:25 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.11: 18-Oct-2017 12:16 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.10: 18-Oct-2017 12:13 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.9: 11-Oct-2017 16:33 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
  v.8: 10-Oct-2017 09:52 - MathBrush
Changed Web site URL, download links
v.7: 07-Oct-2017 12:32 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.6: 07-Oct-2017 12:29 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.5: 06-Oct-2017 14:54 - MathBrush
Changed external review links
v.4: 05-Oct-2017 14:47 - MathBrush
Changed description
v.3: 01-Oct-2017 16:53 - MathBrush
Changed IFIDs, genre, forgiveness
v.2: 01-Oct-2017 16:38 - CMG
Changed cover art
v.1: 01-Oct-2017 16:38 - CMG
Created page