#terminal interface

[lendubsofficial]

finally started uploading an ARG project i’ve been slowly building for a while and i’m honestly really excited about it

it follows a university archivist who discovers a hidden office and an old external hard drive labeled PROJECT_Y, then decides to document the contents before telling anyone else it exist

the story unfolds through:

screen recordings

transcribed files

archive restorations

community posts

and audience participation puzzles!

it’s very slow burn and heavily inspired by old internet mysteries, archival research, obsolete software, and weird academic documents

also i got way too invested in designing fake research papers and archive metadata for this thing

first log is up now :)

[cyberpunklesbian]

ifcomp 2018 notes: Terminal Interface

This is a rather short limited parser game. The conceit is that you're a person remote-controlling a disabled mech, with the pilot giving you commands and "tagging" objects that you can interact with. It's a pretty cool justification for the parser interface, imo.

This reminds me of Lux, also from this comp, but in parser. Like Lux, you're blind, with someone else telling you about your surroundings, where supposedly there was a massive accident that destroyed everything, and where you're trying to escape from the remnants of the accident.

I liked the limited parser interface; there wasn't anything overly complicated for a non-parser player like me.

[spoilers]

Okay, so this is like Lux in a lot of ways, the most noticeable being the unreliable (and somewhat evil) narrator. Unlike Lux's neutral and comforting narrator, here the narrator's voice was really obnoxious. Which should have clued me in, before I completed his plan in the first playthrough. Also like Lux, there’s an evil corporation, or perhaps multiple evil corporations.

The actual gameplay was pretty straightforward. There weren't any real puzzles to speak of, besides figuring out the narrator's plan. But this might be for the best; more complicated puzzles might just distract from the interesting things done with narration.

I've discovered three "endings", one where the dude escapes with the laptop and succeeds with his plan, one where I incinerated the laptop and the dude ran away, and another one where I killed the dude by punching myself while inside a room with toxic gas. However, none of these resulted in a standard "ending" screen; instead I just found myself standing there controlling an empty mech. Is there another ending?