The Maker's Eden

[got_quiet]

Name: The Maker's Eden
Status: Incomplete
Site: https://screwylightbulb.itch.io/the-makers-eden
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Description: Post-apocalyptic android dystopia point and click.

An incomplete game, and one that relies very heavily on cliffhangers and conspiracy, so it's doubly frustrating. It's also yet again not really a visual novel but a point-and-click puzzle game, where the game play consists entirely on figuring out what you're supposed to click on in the scene.

 

The plot is a rainy post apocalyptic noir. You emerge from a pod not knowing who you are or what is going on, and are given a cryptic message telling you that you aren't safe and need to escape the group that woke you up. From then on you travel around the city, meeting friendly people along the way, in a quest to figure out who you are, and later, to deal with the revelations of the first act. Theme wise there's nothing new. The combo of futuristic robot society mixed with retro architecture and technology like landline phones is a old reliable trope at this point. The game pulls that off competently, so if you like that sort of thing you'll like this. There's a small cast of characters you meet who help you out for no particular reason beyond they are a little counter culture and dissatisfied with the iron fist of the megacorp that essentially runs the world. Your two main friends are a laid back Taxi driver and a nervous cleaning bot.

Gameplay is kinda basic for a puzzler like this. Basically you are given a scene with maybe 4 interactable objects, and often times you just have to click on the right one. For example you need to find a number and speaking with a sentry gives it to you. Or you talk to a few people in the room, one directs you to another, who directs you to a third, and once you've followed the clearly marked suggestions in the convo you're done. There are very few cases in which you need to chain actions to solve a puzzle. In cases where the puzzles were a little more complex they were not particularly satisfying. One puzzle requires you to move connections around a board until they connect the right letters to the right numbers. It's just a guessing game before you track down the puzzle hint, and with the hint it's trivial. There's also a puzzle where you need to splice together a conversation that will trick a guard away from his post. You get maybe 25 lines and you need to arrange 3 to make a convincing trick. This puzzle suffers from being too open ended and requiring the player to guess at the dev's intention, since there are a few decent arrangements that seem like they would work fine. But none of the puzzles are particularly infuriating, which means their faults are forgivable for me.

The weirdest and most frustrating part of the game is the decision to add a sort of parallax element to every scene. Whenever you move your mouse the entire scene shifts angles, but only very slightly, so that if you take your mouse from one side of the screen and move it all the way to the other, you haven't really gotten any new scenery on the edges, but everything has leaned over in one direction. It was distracting and kept making me feel like there was something out of bounds that I was missing, and it didn't contribute any to a sense of atmosphere or immersion. Near the end of the game I stopped noticing it, but in the beginning it was driving me a little nuts.

The game looks like it was published around 2015 initially, and part two appears to have come out in the same year. So it's been 5 years of development for part 3. While there does appear to be a decent amount of art assets involved (conversations are illustrated by a comic-like scroll of panels), the complexity of the game is not very high, and my guess is there's some writer's block or something contributing. I don't anticipate the final act being released any time soon. Spoilers here: Part two ends with you about to infiltrate the tower that you had been shot out of at the end of part one. Your mission as the pseudo-clone of the only human above ground is to get control of a "kill switch" that gives him power over all the robots. But the allies you've made have all been robots. You seem determined to both complete your mission, and reject it, by taking control but using it to set robots from from the iron grip of their master instead of initiating a genocide. Why a bunch of robots decide to help you, even though they've known you for less of a day, is handwaved away. That questionable plot choice aside, it is an interesting dilemma the game presents you with. Do you wipe out what appears to be sentient robots so that humanity has a chance again, or do you let the human species die out and leave things alone for a robot society to exit that seems to share all the vices of their makers? As with the rest of the game this isn't a particularly groundbreaking premise, but it's done well enough. Too bad I'll probably never see what the game considers the solution to this problem.