COMPLETE: Instruction Set
Oct. 31st, 2018 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoIFComp time! That's still a thing. Four down, one to go after this.
Instruction Set by Jared Jackson is... not quite "What if Professor Layton were a text parser," but it's similar enough to give a general idea.
There are some scientist types researching something that seems to revolve around you, an entity of some sort, solving "trials" (puzzles) they put you through. Your presence and your ability to communicate with them are critically important, especially after clearing the first few trials (which were just to prove that there really is something there with you and you're not just random input noise.) By then, everyone up to and including some fancy executive type of the whole company are having instant "Your research is producing what? Hold on, be right there, I need to see this" reactions.
It's a basic enough outline of a story, but it's very effective at doing its job of making the player hooked and curious. Who and what am I? Are these people building an AI or something? Why is my ability to successfully communicate with them such a big deal? I wanted to keep playing just to see where they were going with this, and the author deserves a lot of credit for this.
Sadly, the rest of the game drags down the experience with several flaws. Any one of these might have been tolerable, but all of them at once ultimately prove fatal:
All in all, this game feels like wasted potential. I would have liked this if the input worked properly and/or at least acquiesced to modern concessions. (Even in IF, the other IFComp games I reviewed so far let you use the mouse outside cutscenes! Was that text parser for the sliding tile puzzle really the best way that could have been done?) I would have liked it if the ending was as good as my hopes had gotten for it after all the buildup. I would have liked it if... a lot of things, really.
But I don't like it in this state. I'm sorry.
Instruction Set by Jared Jackson is... not quite "What if Professor Layton were a text parser," but it's similar enough to give a general idea.
There are some scientist types researching something that seems to revolve around you, an entity of some sort, solving "trials" (puzzles) they put you through. Your presence and your ability to communicate with them are critically important, especially after clearing the first few trials (which were just to prove that there really is something there with you and you're not just random input noise.) By then, everyone up to and including some fancy executive type of the whole company are having instant "Your research is producing what? Hold on, be right there, I need to see this" reactions.
It's a basic enough outline of a story, but it's very effective at doing its job of making the player hooked and curious. Who and what am I? Are these people building an AI or something? Why is my ability to successfully communicate with them such a big deal? I wanted to keep playing just to see where they were going with this, and the author deserves a lot of credit for this.
Sadly, the rest of the game drags down the experience with several flaws. Any one of these might have been tolerable, but all of them at once ultimately prove fatal:
- There is no offline mode whatsoever. You have to play this online. There's a "Download" link, but that just downloads a basic .html webpage which itself is nothing more than a link to the online version. The usual Online Version Problems of IF games (most notably slow servers and input lag) are present, and now they are completely unavoidable.
- The cutscenes (which, recall, were the part I was most interested in) suffer heavily from delayed or dropped input, oftentimes with no good way of telling which is which. If it says "Click to continue" and you click and it doesn't continue, is it thinking about it/working on it? Or do you need to click again? If you do click again, is it going to advance to the next line of dialogue like it's supposed to? Or is it going to add that click to some sort of backlog and end up skipping through two or three lines at once when the server finally wakes up?
- The actual gameplay, as I said, is a series of Laytonesque puzzles with text input. You have your "this bucket can hold five units of water and this one can hold three, how do you make one of them hold exactly four" puzzle, your "rotate these things to line them up properly" puzzle, etc. Some of these are grating in their own right, but with the text controls and server issues, it's nearly unplayable. Let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've solved the entire FF1 ship minigame sliding tile puzzle via a 30-step series of manually typing out "PUSH 4", waiting 5-10 seconds, manually typing out "PUSH 7", waiting 5-10 seconds, etc.
- While the hook of the story is gripping and I do give the author praise for making me so interested in where this was going that it was worth fighting the rest of the game to get there, the final payoff is... well, kind of a letdown. My guesses were all so much cooler and more interesting than what the actual reveal turned out to be. And the ending is... abrupt? Don't go into this expecting a satisfying epilogue.
All in all, this game feels like wasted potential. I would have liked this if the input worked properly and/or at least acquiesced to modern concessions. (Even in IF, the other IFComp games I reviewed so far let you use the mouse outside cutscenes! Was that text parser for the sliding tile puzzle really the best way that could have been done?) I would have liked it if the ending was as good as my hopes had gotten for it after all the buildup. I would have liked it if... a lot of things, really.
But I don't like it in this state. I'm sorry.