COMPLETE: Out

[kjorteo]

IFComp SPECIAL EXTRA CREDIT EDITION! There are still a couple days to go, and I skimmed past this one on the list once or twice and it looked vaguely interesting, a certain other friend who played it rated it highly, and (most importantly for a last-minute extra credit game) it's under 15 minutes long.

Out by Viktor Sobol is a game in which you begin in your bedroom, and you're ready to come out. In the living room, you see your mom, and you're finally ready to come out. That goes well, but then the dog needs to be taken for a walk, and so it's time to come out....

It's... you literally just type "come out" (or "out" also works) over and over as you leave your home, your street, your town, the planet Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way, and so on, until the game ends. You can also look around and interact with things a little, though that's just for flavor.

I can't in good conscience score this one too highly, because it's so short and so... uh, straightforward? that it's almost hard to even consider it a "real" game. Neither can I go low, though, because what's there is great. It's clever. It plays with how far it can stretch the "come out" or "out" command. It strikes a balance where it's just long enough to strike me with a sense of the incredible vastness of the universe, without being overdone or dragging to the point of tedium. It's brisk. It's cute. It's fun.

Also, you can pet the dog. A+

Comments

[hebethen]

This, I think, is another game that in terms of pure mechanics could have been implemented as a hypertext game (e.g. in Twine) -- but as I've long argued, pure mechanics are not the end of the story. The spontaneity and player-driven action of personally inputting "come out", especially the first time, rather than clicking a built-in link that the author composed for you to view and select, provides a different experience, as does the ability to freely engage with the world flavor -- it contributes to the sense of discovery, the sense of vastness.