IFComp09 reviews: Grounded In Space
Grounded in Space borrows a lot of flavor and style from the Heinlein juveniles, particularly the ones like Farmer in the Sky. The hero, a strapping young lad who is also a skilled engineer with a distressing disregard for human life, endangers people he cares about and is thus condemned to death by his primary caregivers. (As in all young-adult tales, adults are only there to be meddlesome villains, to get their priorities all wrong, and to generally be in the way of our teenaged or preteen heroes, who are maybe a little impulsive but ultimately Know Better.)
So you get to maybe not die, thanks to your aforementioned engineering skills, and you get to save the day and impress the girl next door thanks to your aforementioned disregard for human life. Hooray! A wholesome learning experience for all involved, assuming your disregard for human life didn't actually get anyone killed. Then they kind of lose out, but they were just stubborn grownups anyway.
This sounds a little dismissive, but I don't really mean it that way; it's just that, well, this is every inch a story in the tradition of the classic SF boy's adventure stories, and you would do well to get into that headspace first before you start playing. Fortunately, the writing is clean and energetic enough to carry the mood throughout.
The gameplay, however, didn't quite measure up to the writing. There were three basic modes you were in at any given time: linearly following a fairly strict script, solving the kinds of puzzles you find in brainteaser books, and lastly, timed crisis situations that involve taking tactical advantage of everything at your disposal (which the linear sections handily introduced you to).
The third part was excellent, and the first was well-enough written to keep me engaged (and it familiarized me with the systems I needed to know later). The second part, however, was a hackneyed geometry puzzle that was still impossibly finicky even after you'd solved it on paper. I also found the question poorly posed; I was over halfway through a solution that didn't work before the reason it wouldn't work became clear, and it was something that the protagonist was, I think, supposed to be immediately aware of.
So, that was somewhat annoying. Also, the phrasing for the solution I found to the ultimate crisis (which also turned out to be the one in the walkthrough, happily enough) had impossibly finicky phrasing, and required referring to one of the mining probes as a "station" - something I don't recall it ever referred to as on the text. This either should have been made more flexible, or we should have gotten to do stuff with the station before the first crisis hit.
So yes, this could use a little polishing, and it's short, and some people don't like Heinlein-style boys adventure stories, but this is well-crafted and hits its mark.