A nice little romp through a mysterious world.

The writing is pleasant and sketches an atmosphere through many intriguing details. It’s fun to explore the world and discover the little worldbuilding touches. I loved the opening description of the cell, and the details about the ship.

To me, the main problem was that the game isn’t sure how deep it wants to be. It works perfectly well as a simple adventure with moderate stakes. Attempts to raise those stakes, however, feel half-hearted: even timed or gory scenes never feel like real danger.

There are many threads that never get explored: Did anyone else in the squad get captured, and if so where are they? Why did the aliens leave? Why did they leave behind what they did? Where they the aggressors in the war, or were we? What’s with their taste in furniture? Some of those are bound to stay mysteries, but I’d have liked the player character to try to investigate at all.

Many of the puzzles are underhinted. In particular, the force-field puzzle is misleading, and the solution isn’t really guessable even with the correct understanding.

The map is complex, with many dog-leg or one-way connections, and unusual movement verbs. It makes the exploration more vivid, but also the gameplay a lot more frustrating.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but I think it came off as more light-hearted than intended.

Nice game. It is fairly small but long enough to be entertaining and fit as an entry in ParserComp, though I think longer games should somehow get credit for being long (if they are good). I liked the puzzles, especially the one involving "zhq" (rot13). The final command needed to finish the game required me to look at the hints - something the main character would know, so to me that was a "guess-the-verb/phrase"-problem. But overall, well done!