Chronicler

An incomplete game about a spaceship.  By John Evans

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I’ve had a long time bias against games which start onboard spaceships.  Maybe this is a holdover from my dissatisfaction with the game Starcross, from the early Infocom years.  The space ship setting is a cliche in modern IF, and even if there may have been a few better games in this category since Starcross, there have also been an appalling number of weaker entries.  Maybe next year we can declare a moratorium on space ship games, to explore the myriad other forms of genre fiction.

At least this one doesn’t start with me standing up from a bed and turning off a bloody alarm.  But it does contain a number of other classic weaknesses.  The simple bare room descriptions.  The default response to “examine me”.  The lack of beta testers.  And most unforgivable, the “about” text says the game is incomplete.  The annual comp is not a forum for recruiting beta testers.

I force myself to continue play.  I find about three items and eight rooms.  I encounter a programming error when I try to use the gizmo in the dark room.  I quit.