W. Doug Bolden

Review

Since this is another one of those "a slightly interesting story as to how I came about it", I will start with that. I was curious to find some more information on Malinche's Pentari: First Light and so did a whole websearch. As is sometimes a good habit to do when you want more than standard press releases, I hit the page three button or so and scrolled down from there. I came across an article about an EBay seller who had apparently sold copies of First Light on EBay, as well as several other games. I had not heard of the other games, though the commentary led me to believe they were "free" IF and it also said the seller was including feelies though the games should not have had feelies. Two of thse other games were Ghost Train and House of the Midnight Sun. Upon some research, I found out they were truly free and not just abandonware and they were both the products of a Paul Johson.

I found his website, looked around, and found four games for download. The first one required emulation, so I skipped it and grabbed the other three. The latest one (albeit 2004) was called Jet-Blue and it offered a "secret prize" to everyone who finished. Now, I assumed this prize was going to be an address you could write to and get a free bookmark or something, but still it intrigued me enough to play it right away and see what I got.

Though I did not think about it right off, this game was the first Science Fiction IF that I played to completion. The only other one I have played past the opening scene (nothing against SF games at all, mind you, I just have been playing other things) I gave up on ten scenes in since it was in massive need of retooling. Since all the horror games I have played reference The Lurking Horror, I do have to wonder if any of this game is a reference Planetfall.

The storyline starts with a crashed ship and a man (the PC) waking up on a jungle planet. He has survived the crash and starts wandering around in the jungle towards the crash site. Johnson avoids the map crunching You Are in a Forest opening by having the exits being essentially towards one direction with obvious cues. That earned him some points. You get to a few scenes of wreckage and death and clues start building up that what went wrong is more problematic than first views would lead you to believe. After a couple of quick but somewhat confusing puzzles, you get into the meat of the game.

The game play is episodic. There are a handful of areas and you generally solve a single puzzle, occasionally by a single correct input at the right place and time, to get to the next. There are a couple of instances that involve running back and forth to get an item and use it correctly (the opening Jungle puzzles being the best example all around, though a later "emergency" puzzle involves a similar structure. Once you get through an area, usually marked by a quote screen appearing, you do not have to worry about going back and doing anything. Not only does certain aspects of the game let you more or less loop back around if you want to check something else out, but the nature of the game (which is somewhere between flashbacks and phildickian realities) means that each episode has to be completed to be left behind.

The game ends up shorter than one would hope for. I could tell fairly early on that the game would be short. It felt like the opening to a short game. I hoped I was wrong. The intriguing nature of the plotline meant that going and forth to these difference scenes could end up with a lot of possible narrative and interesting ways for them to play off of each other.

The puzzles encountered are overall strong and fit well into the setting, but are too brief to really help get the flavor going. In a couple of cases, the puzzles feel like repetitions of previous puzzles. The last couple of puzzles, though, are clever enough to be fun.

There are a few flaws in the game. Typography is weak in places, with un-necessary spaces and some typos and apostrophe confusion. Nothing too big (only mildly distractive). Though the game is noted by the author as having something like 40 switches, only a handful do anything of note (the rest are red herrings or there for some minor/fun effects) and 24 of those 40 are part of a single puzzle. Buttons pressed will change outcomes, but sometimes pressing them out of order will confuse things more than it seems like it should. While the NPCs definitely interact and a good amount of this game is about talking to NPCs to get information, the gaps in communication are frequent.

Overall, the game could use a much deeper grasp of synonyms. Quite frequently the word panel is used but sometimes this means display panel and others it means the sort of thing you open and get fuses from. A lot of buttons are pressed, usually differentiated with a simple name: "ALPHA" or "ONE", for instance. Without more detail about the many keys, buttons, screens and panels it all sort of blends together into a mild, descriptive soup.

There are some jabs at Microsoft and McDonalds, which I laughed at but were strangely noncongruent to the work as a whole.

I think the game's biggest sin is that the really intriguing plot, and its fairly intriguing conclusion, are almost nonsensical when you stop and think about it. They don't work together. The dreamlike nature of the games helps you to overlook some of the hiccups, but the final conclusion (the normal one, I have not found the alternate ending yet) requires a slight glance to the side in order to accept it.

Short and creative with some interesting things to say. Includes, by the way, the complete text of "Ulalume". I suggest you read it before and after playing the game. Most bugs are of the sort of "that didn't feel implemented fully" and typography types, rather than anything fatal. Enjoyable and different with an nice mix of puzzles, however few there are. Recommended, but would be better with a slightly patched up release.

Final Scores

(0-100, 50 = Average)

Interactive: 50

Fiction: 65

Reviewer's Tilt: 65

Final Average: 60

Breakdown

• Length: Short
• Difficulty: Fair (though some have said a couple of puzzles are overly hard, I didn't find this to be the case
• Genre: Post-SF
• Content Notes: No gore, no black magic, a couple of philosophical questions and handfulf of references to death
• Pros:
• Neat storyline
• The many references to "Ulalume"
• Interestingly different puzzles in a couple of places
• Cons:
• Needs proofreading
• Playing it feels constrained
• A couple of the puzzles are copycats of earlier puzzles you would have just gotten done with in the game play

How I Did

I've beaten it, and didn't have a heck of a lot of trouble doing so. I only mapped out a couple of areas, and they were both sketchy, simple maps each time. Most of the puzzles just made immediate sense to me, so I didn't have to dawdle.

I have not found the secret ending. I did find the "secret prize" and it is worth playing the game just to get. I enjoyed it, anyhow. It's at least 10x better than any old bookmark.

Hints, Suggestions and Mild Spoilers (for what they are worth)

The first big trick to beating this game is to read carefully and look around at stuff a lot.

The second big trick is to often think of things as being aspects of other things; hinting at other things.