IFComp08: Piracy 2.0
Back in my criteria post, I mentioned a pet peeve of mine: Learning by Dying. That's when a game is basically unsolvable on the first pass; essentially, you need to fail one or more times before you have any hope of succeeding without a walkthrough or a strong hint system.
A second pet peeve of mine: Time limits. These can be done well, or they can be done unfairly and penalize exploration.
Piracy 2.0 has both of these, and they combine in a particularly annoying way.
The game has a strong start; you're playing a government agent who has captured a space pirate captain and is bringing him back to the homeworld for trial. But before you arrive, your ship is attacked and captured by the captain's pirate crew, and you end up in the brig yourself.
The first few puzzles are well-implemented and intuitive. Escape from the jail cell, arm yourself, and try to recover the ship. There's a well-implemented plot tree that allows you to make decisions to direct the plot - for example, when you cause an explosion in an room adjoining the jail cell, the captain announces that someone is coming to investigate. If you go back to your cell and wait, the pirate that arrives notices nothing amiss, buying you a little time before you need to engage the pirates directly.
Once free from the jail, you're free to explore the ship.
But four rooms out of the jail cell, I went north instead of south, which caused me to lose the game. Only I didn't know that I'd lost the game for another 150 turns. On turn 200, my ship automatically fired on the government's battlecruiser, leaving me with 5 turns to enter the security code into the bridge's weapons computer before the battlecruiser obliterated me. Only I didn't have the codes, because 150 turns earlier, I'd turned north, bypassing the computer room with the only terminal containing the codes.
It may have been a different action that trigger the onset on the battlecruiser, but it wasn't well-explained.
Nevermind that as Captain of the vessel, I should know these codes anyway; they're even mentioned (but not given) in the Captain's own terminal.
Another annoyance is something that normally only happens in regular videogames, so it didn't make my 'peeves' list: infinite enemies. The game has a combat system, and once you stir the pirate hornet nest, unnamed pirates periodically teleport into the room with you and begin shooting. There's no realism here, and thanks to the magic of UNDO, you really can kill hundreds of pirates and never run out or even slow the attacks. Of course, several rooms just don't spawn pirates, such as the Captain's quarters, or, inexplicably, the bridge.
Overall, the game had a lot of potential. With some more beta testing and transcript analysis, particularly with an eye towards game flow and fairness to the player, I think it could be a much more solid and interesting adventure game.
5/10 - shows promise, needs work