Game Profile

Author Christy Henshaw Idiom English Authoring System Adrift Release Year 2007 IFR Overall Rating

This game has a lot of backstory and character descriptions, and takes the novel approach of letting you explore in the personae of several different characters before beginning the main game. Unfortunately, I didn't find this exploration particularly directed, since it wasn't at all clear which of this information was going to be useful to me later, or if I should be *doing* anything at this point (in fact, it wasn't really possible to do anything significant at this point).

And once the main game starts, most of the backstory is irrelevant to the main plot. The main plot is a fairly generic space story (rhymes with "car wreck"), although vaguely interesting. But I felt a bit let down that I didn't really need to use the information I found while exploring.

The gameplay also was not that exciting. It mainly involved waiting repeatedly until a few points where you could take action or make choices; trying to do anything except at these points was futile. Your perspective changes among the various characters during this sequence, which is fairly well done (but there are several points where this is not handled properly, such as one point where, as Danny, I am told "The pilot, Danny, is gazing out at space.").

My overall impression of the game was that there were too many long text dumps with very few places to take initiative; the story could have been more interesting if more of the backstory were incorporated into the main game and there was more interaction.