This is a review of A Martian Odyssey, by Horatio (a fellow of infinite jest), a z-code game entered in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Spoilers below.

Here are some other reviews of this game: Peter Nepstad (includes other reviews), Victor Gijsbers, Another Meester Leezard, Joshua H., Nitku, and Stephen Bond (includes other reviews).

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This was a fun setup. Sparse descriptions, chatter from your teammates that set up the background, and it’s a blorb game with setting music! You wander someplace new, and new music starts. Really nice idea. The load times are annoying, but eh, not too bad playing on a modern computer. It would be easier to have transitions or something. It does clock in at 50 meg, though. Biggest text game I ever played. Considering its length, the music does not need to take up that much space.

Starts out normal enough, you crash, and realize you have to head back to your base.

Then things just get weird.

I’m mostly okay with it. The problem is that you just don’t expect it. Martian flora and fauna just start popping up everywhere, completely contradictory to modern exploration of Mars, and I’m like, what the fuck. I was expecting a hard science fiction game, and maybe I shouldn’t have. (The game mentions the atmosphere is too thin to carry the radio waves – but that’s not how radio waves work! How does hydrogen support my life support system, anyway?)

Towards the end, unfortunately, the implementation breaks down. There’s room events showing up in the wrong rooms, the puzzles become almost nonsensical, and the game simply ends. It’s like the author saw the deadline looming, and decided that since he could write a walkthrough for it, it was done.

Technical: A lot of stuff was non-implemented that should have been. I was confused for the first 10 minutes because I thought I was already in the desert, not actually IN my rocket – you only saw the rocket you’re inside after examining it specifically, rather than looking. Your partner for the game often does stuff, but you don’t seem to be able to reference anything he does.

Writing: Very sparse – and it works, usually. But it seems to have erred on the side of fewer descriptions. I’m reading what’s happening in the game and wondering what’s going on, simply because there’s not enough visualization of the action. Room descriptions are often no more than “A boring plain of gray.” It does absolutely nothing for a reader.

Fun: As whiny as I sound, I had a lot of fun at times. The journey home with your bud is neat; you do one thing together, move a ways, do something else, move a ways… It was like a Martian road trip. I realize some people hated it, but as an experience, I thought it was neat. Towards the end, unfortunately, it was just annoying, and I followed the walkthrough.

Do I hope that the author writes more IF? I think so. It was a really neat idea that’s missing the last quarter of the implementation (the quarter that makes me enjoy the game).

Addendum: This was actually an IF implementation of a story from the 30’s! That’s interesting. Sadly a lot of the ideas there – communicating with your buddy – are really incidental to what happens here. I would have loved that, but if there’s no reason to do it, why make it a point? It’s in the byline! No mention is made that you’re learning to communicate with him. A better point may have been to require some sort of ’shared topic of conversation’ before allowing the character to sleep at night.