The Primrose Path takes pains to create a wedge between you the player and Matilda the protagonist, even requiring you to use that wedge to pole vault over the common wisdom of every other game in existence and soar through the air in a giant leap of intuition, landing in an empty room and taking an item whose presence isn’t acknowledged, and yet after the game’s climax, where Matilda succeeds in throwing off your influence entirely, she is proposed marriage by Leo and it’s back to you for the answer.
I don’t think you can have it both ways. But this is a game about time travel, living portraits, and alternate worlds, where there are no consequences that can’t be undone with the right magical device, a game whose message seems to be yes, you totally can.
In The Elysium Enigma, your orders are simple: get in, make contact, get out. I was kind of amazed that the game lets you follow them — wasn’t I supposed to become intrigued, get involved, save the day?
As it turns out, there are a number of enigmas on Elysium. What is it about this planet that requires you to tread so carefully? What’s behind these UFO sightings? Why is your outpost under surveillance? But the game poses none of these questions at the outset. Rather, it’s up to the player to discover whether there’s anything here worth discovering.
The Traveling Swordsman’s implementation is tops; basically anything you can think of to type will either work or tell you why not or what else you might try. It is the only piece of IF I can remember where fighting is not horribly painful. If anything, it’s a little too patient, too forgiving. You don’t get the sense that anything’s at stake. I’d sooner recommend the rough but gripping Unauthorized Termination — a murder mystery set in a dystopia whose rules are so strict you don’t want to try whatever pops in your head.
In the second part of Legion, your planet-sized consciousness is funneled into the corridors of a generic mining outpost. There, between puzzly gadgets, pronoun confusion, and the memories of a generic space cadet, I became trapped in a room called “The Compass” and had to restart.
My least favorite part was having to wander around the outpost awakening memories in my host. Symbiosis may well be the point of the game — for the memories change depending on how you act — but getting players to care about a flesh-and-blood character is even more difficult than putting them in an alien intelligence.
Mobius has a couple great moments — when you realize what’s happening and when you figure out what you have to do to stop it — but isn’t as much fun as All Things Devours. All Things takes place over three floors, involves sneaking around, and alludes to a wider world; the action in Mobius is confined to one room.
Unauthorized Termination’s strongest feature is its alien setting, conveyed in part by the forbidding reference material that’s unnecessary except to reinforce the notion that everything you see and do is so utterly foreign you’ll need the manual to even make sense of it. How are you to solve a murder in a world where the normal adventuring instincts — “owning, carrying, or use of weapons,” “obtaining property,” “amassing wealth” — are punishable by termination?
You’d think Carmen Devine — a game set deep in northern China featuring werewolves, a ruined village, ominous stone markers, and the bloody remains of a brotherhood of monks — would be more diverting. But there’s too much empty space, and not enough to do. So much of what’s mentioned never comes into play. Red herrings are one thing, but I felt like I should have at least been able to talk to the leader of the wolf pack about MARKERS, VAMPIRES, MATE, SYMBOLS, LILIES, CLIFF, CAVE, ROCKS, CHIPS, SPIRIT . . .
I imagine Sisyphus the source code is succinct and funny; Sisyphus the game-world sucks.