Instruction Set

The basic gameplay consists of fairly standard, purely cerebral puzzles, but it gradually emerges that we're in a coma and these puzzles are being fed directly into our brain by doctors and scientists trying to encourage our recovery. The action is seen from the doctors' points of view, with the occasional comment on our activity and cutscenes between puzzles as they get excited about our continued progress.

It's actually kind of sweet, I think.

The cutscenes are played out with cartoon images of the characters and speech bubbles. I rather enjoyed the characterisations; I thought they were cute. It did seem to happen occasionally that clicking or hitting a key didn't advance the dialogue as expected, but the next click usually did it.

Interaction is via parser input, but the puzzles are represented by ASCII art in a separate section of the game window rather than described immediately following each parser entry. This works very well, conveying visually what would be awkward to express in words. At one point, our parser entries began to be followed by the tangentially related memories, which was really exciting for the doctor characters -- but I must confess I was so focused on the puzzles that I barely gave these memories a glance.

So I had fun. As a breakfast, I think this might be waffles with butter and syrup, and weak tea to follow. Just focus on getting your butter and syrup evenly distributed through the waffle grid; that's it ... the tea can wait.