Spaceship! Review
Spaceship! is a group-generated text adventure from the readers of The Grauniad The Guardian’s Games blog. It’s also on the IFDB here.
The premise is pretty straightforward: you (the Captain) are stuck on your (broken) spaceship and must jump through several (puzzle-adorned) hoops to get it working again. The tone of the writing is wry, often hilarious (try examining the Captain’s toilet), and is one of the game’s main strengths. It’s almost entirely maintained throughout, despite the multiple authors, which impressed me. There were only a couple of times that I noticed a change in writing style, and these were minimal.
I suspect that the success of the collaborative writing is almost certainly due to, or helped by, the methods used in construction. The work seems to have been primarily co-ordinated using a wiki, with templates for rooms, items and puzzles for potential writers to fill in. This ensures, for example, that every room has proper exits described and synonyms for every noun (although one of my minor niggles was the occasional lack of these, especially with plural nouns).
The game itself is fairly short, fun, has clearly indicated goals and easy-to-moderate puzzles (at least for this player). There’s a basic hint system, which gives you a one-line nudge depending on where you are in the game, but I didn’t find myself using it very much. The one puzzle that stumped me for a while ended up being a “guess-the-verb” type – I was trying to do the right thing, but was phrasing it incorrectly, and I think a few more implemented phrases would be helpful. Most puzzles are object-based, and have the same dose of humour that occurs throughout. There are also several ways of solving some of them, and more than enough inventory items with which to do so.
There were only two things that genuinely annoyed me in Spaceship!. One was a sudden death that I didn’t think was signposted clearly enough – it felt unfair and frustrating. Luckily, the game is short enough that I didn’t mind restarting. The other was a puzzle which requires a certain amount of current/recent sci-fi pop culture knowledge – possibly it was assumed that players of a sci-fi game will know something about the genre, but I do, and still had to google some facts. Anything that takes the player away from the game is to be avoided, in my opinion.
The reason I enjoyed this game – and I did, despite the above – is the tongue-in-cheek writing. The setting isn’t original, and could easily have fallen flat. (I can see why it was chosen, as it’s an easy one to write for.) However, it doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. The spaceship really feels like a home, the protagonist is characterised just enough, and the puzzles make sense in the environment. It’s not a brilliantly avant-garde piece of IF, but then it isn’t trying to be, and the slight lack of polish in some areas is more than understandable given its community-created origin.
The stated aim was “to create the greatest group-generated text adventure in the world ever”. I can’t say that it is – for one thing, I haven’t played enough group-generated games – but it’s certainly heading in the right direction. I think all involved should consider it a success; it’s an eminently playable game that’s a nice way to pass a lazy afternoon.
Hi Rhian
I just stumbled across your excellent review of Spaceship!, for which I was one of the coders. I had been hoping someone would post a small review of the game on IFDB, so to get a full length review on your blog is great!
I was worried that people would look at the game’s cliched setting and immediately be put off, but I’m glad you were not, and that you were able to appreciate the game’s humour and simple puzzles. Apologies for those points of the game that caused frustration, like the unexpected death — which was presumably oxygen related — and the sci-fi questions puzzle, which could have done with a few more easier questions.
You touched on one of the interesting aspects of the game, and that’s how despite being written by numerous contributors (often even anonymous contributors) the game still hangs together ok — and ok is really an achievement, I think, because the game could have easily ended up an unplayable, unintelligible mess — the project wiki was a little chaotic at times.
My appraisal of the game is similar to yours: it’s not an amazing earth shatteringly brilliant game, but it is quite fun, I think. And this is very pleasing to me since most of the team had very little experience of programming, Inform7 and even Interactive Fiction itself when we first started on the project.
Oops, I’ve rambled on a bit, but one more thing, can I have your permission to link to your review of the game on IFDB? Many thanks.
Many apologies for the lateness of this reply! Various things have kept me from the computer these past few weeks.
I’m glad you liked the review, and I hope that my honest enjoyment of the game came through. On reading it over, I don’t know if I emphasised that enough, especially since I’ve seen far worse efforts from authors working alone, and I imagine that more collaborators doesn’t make the process any easier (probably the reverse?).
Please do link to the review on IFDB, or I could repost it there myself if that would be more efficient.
Just re-read my post. Apologies for writing ‘game’ so many times, and my poor use of dashes. You can tell I did more coding on the project than I did writing! :)