An IFComp06 diary - day XII
Jerom...@googlemail.com
Good lord, it's now been two weeks since I played any comp games. It
would seem that buying a new computer whilst simultaneously having a
new job is a guaranteed way to get absolutely nothing done for a while.
Only a couple of days of the comp left now, so it's going to have to be
a mammoth effort to get through all the games.
Unauthorised Termination 6 55%
This game didn't grab me too much at the outset. The movement system,
by which the main character teleports around to any locations he (it?)
wished to visit, seemed more like laziness on the part of the author
than a novel game mechanic. The writing also seemed rather flat and
uninteresting. As I played on however, the game began to grow on me.
The whole concept of a society of machines, living by strictly codified
rules, was fairly intriguing. I began to think that the rather
unemotional writing was a deliberate choice, to fit with the PC's
viewpoint and the game's overall theme. Even the teleportation movement
system began to feel natural, so much so that when the game suddenly
required me to travel somewhere using a more traditional directional
command, this seemed somewhat jarring. The puzzles achieved a pretty
good balance of difficulty for me, though no doubt some will find them
rather unchallenging. There is a nice plot twist about half way through
the game, which really appealed to me. But other than this moment, the
plot was rather uninspiring in places, and the ending itself provided
no real surprises. Overall, a nice little game with some good ideas,
but ultimately rather spoilt by a plot and setting that could have done
with fleshing out a bit more, plus a rather shallow implementation and
a selection of typos and grammatical errors.