Intelligence

Had a lot of fun, great way to spend a few hours!

a fun mystery with interesting mechanics!!

A really cool little logical puzzle game. There is a hint system, but all of the puzzles are completely solvable without it, though some may less straightforward than others. All tied together by a sensible storyline. The interface is pretty clunky, but you get used to it. (Hint: bookmarks are your biggest asset) Bottom line: quite enjoyable, definitely worth the price.

This is a free to play game, so yes I did get it for free. This was recommended to me via the Failbetter Games newsletter - and I've been having a lot of fun! The puzzles are not too difficult, as long as you pay attention to the details - I do recommend taking notes outside the game, because it can become a bit tedious searching through all the different sets of information you've gathered as you go on. I do wish you were able to save more than one item to your clipboard at a time, since my playstyle had me going back and forth a lot, and it took me a little time to get used to how the to navigate through the different in-game functions. (You have to click on the right piece of info, you can't just type it in), so that made things more clunky when I knew what I needed, but did not have that available in the clipboard at the moment. I am slowly working through the storyline, looking forward to see how it goes! It's a pretty light story, but you can sense that there's more lurking underneath the surface, even if it isn't laid out explicitly.

A fun, free sci-fi puzzle game where you use a variety of data to try and find a missing fleet of spaceships and uncover what's really going on in the system. Great if you like these types of text-based deduction games, if not a bit easy compared to others I've played. Overall though, a solid and cohesive experience that I enjoyed and can recommend!! My main gripe with this game is mainly the UI, which I felt I was sometimes fighting AGAINST me rather than working WITH me. You have a fixed screen and can only pull up a few info tabs at a time, and all of your final deductions and accessing new info relies on copy-pasting keywords from a wide variety of tabs. However, you can only have ONE thing copy-pasted at a time, so it can be a bit tricky to work around and I definitely overwrote keywords unintentionally pretty often. Aside from that, though, I appreciate that you have a way to search through all information you've gathered already and I think there's a lotta charm in the art style and setting. The writing for one character in particular was a bit...meh, if only because I think it unintentionally betrayed the twist pretty early, though that might just be my familiarity with similar mystery plotlines.

You know how just one thing can ruin an experience? That happened to me with this game. I really wanted to like this game. I enjoyed myself up until the ending, Hunting for clues and figuring out where all the ships were and what happened to them. Everything was going fine up until the few puzzles and the twist in the ending was revealed. The twist turned a fairly solid mystery into a hamfisted strawman political allegory and turned a character presented for most of the game as a conspiracy theorist who wouldn't tell you anything directly into a the one in the right. There are ways of doing this sort of story right and they need a lot more good foreshadowing than one character repeatedly saying "You should stop. You are doing the wrong thing." There was a lot of potential in this, but it failed in the final stretch. That is why I can not recommend this game.