NoamSplodey!

[prog]

I just beat All Things Devours, a small and devious one-giant-puzzle game that was among the winners in last year's IFComp. I really liked it.


The puzzle involves time travel, within a very short slice of timeline. Besides being a very tricky and wonderfully set-up game, I really like the way the plot handles the whole causality issue, always a popular condundrum in the literature, with nearly as many solutions as there have been time-travel stories written. In this particular story, if anything capable of making observations observes A and then (through temporal meddling) also observes A' at the exact same moment, then the observer immediately blows up through a simple mass→energy conversion.

Example from the game: you pass a closed door, then go back in time, open the same door, and go inside. Your past-time counterpart happens across the door (as she is fated to) but finds it standing open, even though you observed that it was closed back when you were her. What the -- KER-BOMP

I take great satisfaction from the idea that the universe has such a ridiculously blunt and inelegant zero-tolerance solution to time paradoxes. It makes me laugh, anyway.

The game is set in an unnamed MIT research lab, and I must admit that I also got a kick out of destroying the greater Boston area every time I made a mistake, as the poor character's body becomes a perfectly efficient nuclear bomb. I trashed the town dozens of times before I finally hit the solution. It was great.

(Given the character's field of research, the building is probably not the Stata Center, but I just wanted to say "NoamSplodey!" anyway.)

Comments

[ubiquity.livejournal.com]

That was cool. Thanks for the recommendation! (:

[novalis.livejournal.com]

I finally got around to this, and it's definitely a good game. Now I must play more IF. I almost wanted to write software to help me solve it, but instead just used a "spreadsheet" consisting of a columned text file.

Thanks for the recommendation!

[prog.livejournal.com]

I used an outliner. By the end I was basically writing batch scripts. This totally broke mimesis -- I was now programming a robot through an obstacle course, rather than trying to save the world -- but it was still hella fun.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I started writing batch scripts quite early; I would translate my timeline into a script, toss it into the game to see where it broke, debug it, etc. Of course, since I'm a programmer by nature (and not by occupation), I don't mind doing it that way.