As a narrative adventure game, Mémoire 0079 is quite an interesting concept. Login in as a player into a fictional terminal to uncover reports about a distant future and exploring both sides of a war. A narrative focused in on two major players during this fictional sci-fi conflict: Vega Hawthorne of the United Earth and Raya Sokolova of the Ceresian Republic. Both held up by their respective governments as great heroic figures, through propaganda and personal ideologies. It's all a novel idea, pulling your sympathies in multiple directions on whose story you might read first. Well, but here can we get into the biggest issue with the game, the fact that it's infact nothing more than a surface level novelty.
There is no real game to speak of here, just walls of unwieldy text to click through and mountains of hyperlinks that pull your attention away from reading what seems like it could be an engaging story. Just to be stoped dead in your tracks while reading in order to look up words and events you really have no context for and there for might not even care about right away. I know that is the idea and the game's own web page describes itself as "a unique narrative adventure game about exploring a wiki-like interface", but I fell like if you want to fully engage the reader into your world, it helps to have a clearer structure to the events being told. You can still have all the gimmicks of personal logs, redacted sections in government documents and military propaganda. Maybe have some real time email traffic or chats you can respond to popping up on the side as you browse the wiki. Having you engage with the world in a tangible way, and perhaps even being able to make a choice for what side your sympathies align more. All in all, the most important aspect would be reducing the amounts of hyperlinks. Even just including a separate glossary on the side to pull up would help. In my opinion, it's better to make the broad strokes of your Universe as basic and understandable as possible and then you can bombard your audience with the more complex stuff later. The Universe is still interesting, mind you, there is potential here, but it's the dialogue between characters where the game ultimately shits the bed.
Throughout many of the personal logs and transcripts present here, these two warring factions feel less like opposing cultures and more like drunk discord mods. It's the clearest evidence of to the fact that if you want to make a distinct fictional universe, you need to put in some effort in to establishing a culture and a way of language. Especially if the main point of your story is to contrast the two factions against each other. I don't think Captain Picard encountering the Borg for the first time and trying to contact the Federation about the immediate danger would have had nearly the same impact as it did, if they're back and forth dialogue mainly consisted of “Naaaaah”, “lol”, “lmao” or “can we talk about the fact that they suck shit”. Not quite as impactful I would say.
If I had to pull up one last positive at the end, it probably be the presentation. It's all presented quit nicely through the UI of an old school computer terminal, with atmospheric background tracks. Although I would have liked to have more tracks overall, having some pages be completely silent while the next one suddenly ear blast you with a loud background track was an odd experience. Overall this was a neat project, that needed about 5 more rewrites and revisions. It's free to play in your browser anyway, so there is no harm in checking it out and having a laugh at it atleast. Maybe the next one will be better, always possible.
There is no real game to speak of here, just walls of unwieldy text to click through and mountains of hyperlinks that pull your attention away from reading what seems like it could be an engaging story. Just to be stoped dead in your tracks while reading in order to look up words and events you really have no context for and there for might not even care about right away. I know that is the idea and the game's own web page describes itself as "a unique narrative adventure game about exploring a wiki-like interface", but I fell like if you want to fully engage the reader into your world, it helps to have a clearer structure to the events being told. You can still have all the gimmicks of personal logs, redacted sections in government documents and military propaganda. Maybe have some real time email traffic or chats you can respond to popping up on the side as you browse the wiki. Having you engage with the world in a tangible way, and perhaps even being able to make a choice for what side your sympathies align more. All in all, the most important aspect would be reducing the amounts of hyperlinks. Even just including a separate glossary on the side to pull up would help. In my opinion, it's better to make the broad strokes of your Universe as basic and understandable as possible and then you can bombard your audience with the more complex stuff later. The Universe is still interesting, mind you, there is potential here, but it's the dialogue between characters where the game ultimately shits the bed.
Throughout many of the personal logs and transcripts present here, these two warring factions feel less like opposing cultures and more like drunk discord mods. It's the clearest evidence of to the fact that if you want to make a distinct fictional universe, you need to put in some effort in to establishing a culture and a way of language. Especially if the main point of your story is to contrast the two factions against each other. I don't think Captain Picard encountering the Borg for the first time and trying to contact the Federation about the immediate danger would have had nearly the same impact as it did, if they're back and forth dialogue mainly consisted of “Naaaaah”, “lol”, “lmao” or “can we talk about the fact that they suck shit”. Not quite as impactful I would say.
If I had to pull up one last positive at the end, it probably be the presentation. It's all presented quit nicely through the UI of an old school computer terminal, with atmospheric background tracks. Although I would have liked to have more tracks overall, having some pages be completely silent while the next one suddenly ear blast you with a loud background track was an odd experience. Overall this was a neat project, that needed about 5 more rewrites and revisions. It's free to play in your browser anyway, so there is no harm in checking it out and having a laugh at it atleast. Maybe the next one will be better, always possible.
MrWarm
13 days ago