Foreign Soil, by Olaf Nowacki, is the beginning of a parser-driven sci-fi adventure, one whose demo duration leaves the potential scale of the whole open to speculation.
In the striking opening scene, the PC is born, messily and with plenty of fluid, of a sarcophagus on an alien planet. Her apparent task: to establish a colony from scratch. It seems a bit pessimistic on the part of her parent civilisation to have preserved its colonists in containers that are basically elaborate coffins, but sarcophagi are certainly cooler than glass tubes. Thus the game starts out well.
After solving a few uncomplicated waking-up-groggy puzzles, the player gets to have a look outside the ship. For me, donning a suit and going through an airlock always takes me back to Scott Adams's Strange Odyssey – you've probably got your own first airlock. The scale of the landing crater is conveyed by splitting it up into numerous empty locations, simply connected. And the bounds of the crater are really the bounds of this introduction, as far as I can tell. Someone else already reported not being able to progress beyond the pulling of a lever found on the outside of the spaceship, however we could all be wrong! If there is more to this demo, please let me know, anyone. This invitation is extended to the author as well, though obviously the author should contact me privately and make sure they avoid breaking any Introcomp rules.
In reviewing my transcript of the game, I realised that the strength of the birth scene is essentially the strength of the whole demo. Beyond that point, the descriptions, design and implementation quickly slide towards the minimal. In terms of my expectations for an extended version of this game, I'd be wanting everything to be as interesting as that first scene. In terms of imagery, the author has already shown that they've got that up their sleeve.
The trick would seem to be that the goal of establishing a colony is a pretty radical one with many dimensions. Would the player have to resurrect other colonists? Find and develop food and shelter? Change the atmosphere? Explore the planet? I can imagine an old school Scott Adams (again) implementation of these ideas that would barely convey them in satisfactory fashion to contemporary players, and the result would be a simple and non-modern game. That's definitely not where I would encourage the author to go. Yet the alternative is looking like a (scarily?) large and complex game to develop. One that might be too big to take on, considering some of the introductory level work that needs to be done on this demo. The main issues with what exists are a lack of support for obvious synonyms, and the game not catering to most common alternative methods of conveying similar ideas to what the game wants. The descriptions of locations quickly become bare, meaning there isn't much to interact with.
A rhetorical aside: How much stuff should we implement in a game? The general trend over time (like, decades) has been towards more. This is both a function of acquiring the technological ability to do it, and because implemented people and scenery and objects open up the interactivity of the parser game. But as parser games have gotten bigger, the work of implementing everything has increased exponentially, even though the games are still generally the work of one person. So we have seen creative offshoots which involve restricting the parser's vocabulary, or deliberately choosing not to implement as much in this traditional sense ("light implementation") and to focus on other aspects or mechanics of the game.
Returning to Foreign Soil, it's definitely in the sci-fi world genre of parser game that draws power from medium to heavy implementation. If it were to follow up on the quality of the first scene, I would like to see the rest of it, but I fear I might be waiting years for the result if the game continues on its current trajectory of asking the player to establish a colony. Of course there are a thousand excuses that could be made to turn the story in other directions that might be less difficult to implement and complete. Or even a strange version of the initial one. My advice to the author would probably be to not overreach with the scope of this project. That first scene can certainly be worked into something manageable.
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