The 'not THAT Brian Rushton' quip is a minor joke you'll get once after you've typed CREDITS in this game.
Ether is a charming parser adventure in which you play a flying nautilus that must collect and manipulate objects in a world of pristine X-Y-Z elemental axes. Air pressure varies along one axis, weather virulence along another and temperature along the third. You can move up, down, west, east, north or south, or in combinations of these directions, to fly around within the virtual cube of the gameworld.
The nautilus has positively-tinged existential concerns and enjoys doing the things it does. The game's puzzles are uncomplicated and almost arcade-gamey in some ways. Also arcade-gamey is the manner in which the nautilus can acquire various power ups as it goes along.
Considering Ether's technical polish, its environment assembled from graceful, procedurally generated prose, its general ease of play and short playtime, I find it easy to recommend it to any compgoers – except perhaps those who find themselves boggled by spatial relationship problems. Nautilus's challenges are light by the standards of such problems, and there aren't even that many of them, but I suspect that some people simply can't handle this kind of 3D thing in prose.
Further review with spoilers beyond the cut.
I suggested in an earlier IFComp review that MTW's The Sueño could have been longer in order to eke more from its mechanics, and the same is true of Ether. Probably truer. This is because Ether's mechanics of 3D movement and light physics are much more explicit, and perhaps a little underused for how strong they are. The player graduates from chasing one object to two, then to four. And the objects start moving around at the behest of the forces of nature. I'm not arguing that the game should have gone on to have the player juggle eight objects, for instance, as I imagine that would be beyond the comfortable limit of her/his ability to clock all the movement vectors that would be reported each turn. But I still would have enjoyed more complications or variations being introduced in further levels of the game, given the high number of factors already in play and possibilities for interactions amongst them.
The magnitude of the nautilus's existential narration felt a little too great to me, even though the gameworld's big arc over a relatively short playspan is handled well. There's a fine gradation in the adjustments made to the description of the environment as things become more unstable, and ultimately the situation generates apocalyptic phenomena like a big bang and a rebirth. These phenomena are powerful enough, and reached quickly enough, that I felt I didn't also need the nautilus's sentimental commentary on them. I'm not anti-sentiment per se, I just felt Ether tipped a little too much into this zone in relation to its duration and the scale of the content.
I also felt odd about the bookending of the game by poetry, mostly because it gave me a concluding impression that the nautilus was thinking these very human thoughts. I know the cephalopod wasn't literally thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem 'The Chambered Nautilus', but that's kind of the impression the poem's reappearance left. The poem's concerns and language were too earthly for me in light of my efforts to imagine myself as a flying cephalopod, even though I'd granted the nautilus enough anthropomorphisation to allow the game to work in the first place.
Ether is the author's first game, and with or without my literary qualms, it's a fine one.
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