The Stack

Marco Innocenti gives us a followup to last year’s Andromeda Awakening. Spoilers follow the break.

Andromeda Awakening, you may recall, told the story of one man’s efforts to survive the cataclysms wracking the planet Monarch, capital of the human colonies in Andromeda. I personally didn’t get very far in it, as I found the game’s puzzle content obtuse enough to make me give up, but Andromeda Apocalypse provides a recap of what I missed: the complete destruction of the planet, with the player character as the only survivor, fleeing in a small alien spacecraft. In the beginning of the present game, this collides with a much larger vessel, giving us a puzzle basis along the lines of Starcross and its ilk: exploring what’s effectively a ghost ship, repairing its systems and learning to make them work for you, and discovering its backstory.

Now, this story is a pretty major break from the previous one, which was set on the protagonist’s home planet. He had an emotional connection to that environment, and you got to watch him see it all crumble in front of him. But he has no more emotional connection to the ghost ship than the player does. It would be easy for the plot to turn into mere monkeying with machines, but the author has other ideas, and implements those ideas by sticking in occasional flashbacks to the old days back on Monarch before the first game. But these flashbacks basically provide nothing to do but type “talk to <NPC>” repeatedly until the game runs out of canned conversation and puts you back into the present. To my mind, this just heightens the disconnection to what you’re actually doing in the game. But that’s a pretty high-level complaint; the fact that this is the sort of thing I find to object to is a mark in the game’s favor.

Stronger connections to Monarch are found when you reactivate the ship’s computers and can question the AI about the ship’s history, and I feel like this part works better, involving as it does both your past situation and your present one simultaneously. The same AI provides a great deal of guidance for the rest of the game about what you’re supposed to be trying to accomplish. Perhaps Innocenti is compensating here for the problems people had with the previous game. I certainly find it an improvement, even if it does feel a little like being led by the nose sometimes.

I can’t say it’s a perfect experience. Sometimes the prose is a little weird. I managed to lock myself out of victory early in the game, and only discovered this towards the end. But of all the games I’ve played for the Comp so far, this is the one that feels fullest, the most like it’s a complete game and a complete story. I mean, it’s definitely just one chapter in an ongoing story, but at least it takes the time to develop that chapter as much as it needs to.

One point of curiosity: Achievements. This game keeps an Achievements list. Which is to say, it keeps a list of significant actions (some of them optional) performed in the current session, which is something that a lot of Inform games do. But usually this list is accessible via the “FULL SCORE” command, and here it is instead conceived as Achievements. Because why cling to traditional IF terminology when you’re writing for a wider world? Something to think about.