Game Review for What Happened to the Crew?
Got the True ending, but no ‘all records found’ note. I will not recommend this game to my friends; there was one big issue and a whole bunch of little things that should have been ironed out in playtesting that flattened the whole experience.
This review will mention spoilers.
What worked
The graphical elements and atmosphere are excellent. On desktop, it was a pleasure reading and navigating, even when more complex interfaces were brought out later. Thinks were clickable when it helped. The basic commands like help, dir, find, etc. worked well …with caveats I’ll get to.
The hints remaining per file felt accurate and useful.
The “find” command wins the crown. I wish the prompt for it showed up a little earlier.
The ‘label’ and ‘note’ commands deserve praise for ease of use. I would have labels display the in the file’s header so I could copy the existing text if I wanted to append something and wouldn’t accidentally overwrite it later not knowing I had already labeled the file for something else. (I kept track of artifacts and deaths in labels but also some file discovery order so I would check stale files first when I was stuck as a refresher.)
The starting files and position in the narrative were well chosen.
What I didn’t like
One room per one timepoint isolates the crew from each other too much
The core structural gameplay flaw is that the syntax of the terminal entry system is at cross odds with writing strategies that work for non-linear mysteries. Most entries in this game are the initials of everyone who is in a particular room at a certain time (Example “01-BR-R-S” for timepoint 1 at the Station BRidge with persons ‘R’ and ‘S’ ). The unofficial goal is to assign everyone alive to a room at each time point and establish their personal continuities. (That ‘unlocks’ certain key meetings where groups intersect that you probably couldn’t deduce otherwise.)
But to make that work, the characters go directly to their next story room and mostly do not travel through intermediate locations, pass by others on their way, see aftermath, and offer hearsay and eyewitness accounts of ‘what I saw while moving around’. The result is that a lot of the characters are disjointedly doing their own individual things leading to disconnected character arcs that don’t organically play off one another except in a few moments. The crew don’t really feel like a ‘crew’ and the love and paranoia and accusations they make come across somewhat stilted. The chaos of the murders and especially Michael’s story as he sneaks around feels stunted by this system.
Zero was introduced too quickly - the 99 camera and the core directory needed some time to marinate before the red text came out.
The story tripped over itself and missed an opportunity to build suspense by revealing Zero at the same time as the 99 camera. “Experience a chilling sci-fi horror story through vivid text descriptions where the scariest things are what you don’t see.” That’s one of the selling points of the game that just didn’t deliver because it’s too easy to fill the second manifest and see him. The narrative works way better when the 99 camera has the solo for a bit, which is how I played the first run through. Every time I ‘found’ Zero by camera failure increased the intrigue.
It would be way more interesting for me as a player to not to start with any red text outside of one corrupted email after the initial Alpha-Demon unlock, but to gradually realize by messing around with the 99 camera that there is a 13th crew member only seen by camera failure. The way my play session went is that I chased him around without working his manifest and then slowly boxed him in like a hunter. Only then did I solve the manifest and allow myself to see him. It would have been amazing to do that, but have red encrypted text spread and infect more and more files every time I tagged the room zero is in with the 99 camera until I got him 4 or 5 out of the 17 times and everything becomes plaintext from him and his manifest unlocks.
The second time I played, I started with his manifest, and it didn’t feel nearly as satisfying.
See it once or fail forever clues.
One of the other major design flaws is that certain story highlights are bottlenecked behind a single ‘see it or fail’ clue that really can’t be attacked from multiple angles once you have scavenged enough paths.
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The big one that seemed to catch a lot of people if the comments are an indicator: Alex’s motive, gatekept behind single example of an individual crew cabin (which might have been duplex or dormitory unit before you understood naming conventions), and how to deduce the rest of the room names from that. (This one got me. Issue could be solved with a command to validate room codes by ID and giving them a full name like DU = Dupont’s Unit.)
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Barry’s last name needed to complete the manifest is also locked behind Alex’s motive as pain on punishment for missing one unexplained syntax quirk. Many players will probably scum to complete the manifest.
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Playing anywhere between 10 to 20 single games of word.exe is necessary to unlock the second mode. It is an absolute buttpain that you have to play four annoying fluff rounds before you get one shot at the real thing which is a fake word for no good reason at all. It’s supremely obnoxious, so I could see people putting it off.
And to a lesser degree things that didn’t stump me but I could see being problematic…
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Spotting the hydroponics unit on the map, not mentioned in text by characters in the main game before then. (Didn’t get hung up on that, but saw other people did.)
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Finding a hidden room not listed on the map whose name is tucked in 10K words of lore docs dropped all at once you get the computer unlocked. The white text helps. (holden)
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Knowing that the final entry is a room also not on the map and has a code also dropped in the middle of 10K words of lore docs. (jd-journal-10 and /documents/scans/signal-analysis) The white text helps, but I got it by goofing around with the 99 cam. It is outside on the surface and not on the map, so people might not think to check for it at all, thinking that surface will cover it or there isn’t a camera there.
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Knowing how to route all three powers to the remote relay in the present (and not just 1), which somewhat illogically makes the camera work in the past rather than merely in the present. I stumbled into the right answer just messing around, not because I thought it made sense and would yield results.
Terminal syntax ruins the experience for new players
The most ass-pain aspect of the game was the terminal syntax. This is what had me in the comments looking for answers: I couldn’t use the tools I was given because it wasn’t spelled out how exactly to type them in and there were no error messages to debug my errors.
The number one problem I encountered multiple times in my run was that people names had to be entered in alphabetical order in feeds for no in-game explained reason AND there was no special error message kicked back “USE ALPHABETICAL ORDER” if you botched it. I got hung up on this in early game when I didn’t know it was a rule - I had gotten lucky so far, and later when I had long 5 or 6 person entries, I thought I was simply wrong and missing somebody rather that suspecting I fat fingered someone out of order.
Trying room codes likewise also sent me to the comments. There needs to be a unique error message for “room not found.” The combination of misnaming a room while having characters out of alphabetical order because I didn’t know that was a thing yet nearly had me rage quit in the first 15 minutes. It set a negative tone for rest of the game. I cannot overstate the frustration of this. It would have been helpful to have a standalone room name validator at the very beginning before the 99 camera to test and validate room names. Example: typing “Hab CA” for habitability would get a report that the cargo bay is currently unsafe due to a breach in walls from explosion and generalized failure of life support. These early claims allow the player to categorize the damage to the station early in the story and try to work out how it happened from there.
The syntax for entering names into the manifest (“name N Lieutenant Neil Armstrong” for BOTH manifests) is not explained well enough. When you first get the name hint, the format looks like “[n] [Lieutenant] [Neil] [Armstrong]” because there are no quotes around the name to indicate it is a command unless you go back to the help screen). The syntax should have been written as a hint in both manifests.
It was not super obvious the player uses the 99 Camera like it is a person: e.g 01-MA-99. The 99 camera tried to indicate it could be used as a ‘person’ by appearing as ‘&99’, harkening back to the letter codes as they appeared before the player started using the name function, but that’s stale and unreferenceable knowledge by the time you get the &99 camera because you’ll have overwritten all the names with the name function. It’s really bad if you don’t play through in one sitting and your recollection dulls.
Zero is not clearly introduced as someone you can follow in feeds. ‘0’ is a number rather than a letter. And ‘&0’ would have kept with prior convention and the 99 camera. It’s also egregious that ‘0’ is introduced last on the new manifest list, but they go first in alphabetical order with no nudge. But, hey, at least you can use the name command to rename your new target to “BFG9000 Fodder” and have that show up in the credits.
Not making flashing a “WRONG PASSWORD - RETYPE ‘dir /admin’ to try again” to make it clear you only get one shot at the second mode unlock password per command. Putting in the right password the second time and getting a null because you skipped the dash the first time without retyping dir /admin will leave you very confused.
Save file
Why is the save file a whole 252 Kilobytes? To compare, I’ve got a text file that is 24,000 words long and it is only 148 Kilobytes. Does it contain an easter egg picture or all the text in the game or something? It’s odd and makes me think something about the save isn’t working right.
The characters and experiment: they weren’t special and were confusing at times
The dialogue with the men slobbing over the women didn’t lead to any major new deductions about which two might be in a room together for an important clue. It also felt very tacked on - I’d would have rather heard some experiment or work gossip about artifact and rocks or Jackie and Michael having arguments and what Dana was doing with Michael to make Alex jealous. Jackie and Barry’s 09 romance scene in Jackie’s room as they are trying to search for an alien containment device after Dana has been murdered and Bobby has been blown up and they were knocked unconscious is really bizarre. Same with Elizabeth and Sebastian. And then the random weed smoking before the double kill. There’s self destructive behavior, and then there’s whatever nonsense that was.
The tension between Jackie and Michael over the experiment was tragically undercooked. Why did Michael think the mystery energy needed to be embedded in someone (why not a plant?) so his attack on Lenny made more sense vs. Jackie’s corrupted ‘containment device’ whatever the heck that was supposed to be. Frankly, even after playing back twice I am still confused why Mike was trying to hide the specimens from Jackie outside anyway. They needed some emails firing back and forth to more clearly explain their different views of the project leading up to Michael’s secretive behavior before they summoned the thing which might explain why it behaved the way it does. More emails would have really helped.
The story missing the emphasis on the B■■■■st samples and experiments really threw me for a loop. The major ‘artifacts’ needed more attention and grounding, because they just sort of happened in a way that wasn’t too important to many logical deductions. By the time I got to the end, I was like oh yeah, I guess that man had absconded with a sample, tried to drag some case around, the imported rocks changed shape and became eggs, an orb moved on its own, and that killed that other guy? Sure. I guess. It just didn’t feel like it mattered. I know the clinging energy was a thing, but the rock plot still felt unmoored from the main convos. Bad rocks are bad, I guess.
Carl and Isaac were just kind of present as cannon fodders to pad the death count. Robbie at least kind of existed briefly.
So, I just kind of wound up shrugging when Zero’s “they were your crew in the end” line landed and my empathetic connection to them was closer to ‘the familiar neighborhood feral cats I rounded up to get neutered.’
Speaking of Zero, the big bad was skillfully written in the technical creepy and gloating sense, but stepping back for a broader view I’m still kind of confused about how or why Zero was so personal with this station’s crew in the notes when he also claimed to be a recent arrival, twisted people with substance use disorders, yet was also impersonal about the way he mangled everything like Zero was dispatched from the hells as a special ops agent to silence everyone involved in B■■■■st. I was waiting to find out that someone in the station suicided in the B■■■■st to explain the personalization. Zero was also crowing about how maybe he might have struggled if not for various characters being dulled by their drug or love escapades, but the baddie could turn into mist, fly, cause explosions at will, drain life, and control deadly creatures like a Challenge Rating 13 Dungeons and Dragons vampire against a party of sub-levels 1s. I’m shocked Zero perceived any of the crew as the least bit threatening; ‘demonhunter’ was far too much of a compliment to Jackie. Eldritch characters don’t have to be cohesive, but Zero didn’t stick the landing. I renamed him to “D.A.R.E. Demon” because ‘don’t do drugs or you’ll be eaten by slugs.’
Suggested redesign to better deliver the mystery
If I were to redesign this game, I would have made it easier to follow the crew through rooms with a ‘partial credit indicator’ that unlocks the next feed with question marks for the people if you get one character present correct …BUT all the text is encrypted, sometimes with only a few key lines unencrypted. That extra forgiveness makes it easier for characters to make more complex movements through multiple rooms and have more interactions, yet only one ‘counts.’
After filling the first manifest of names and roles (make it a bit easier, e.g. Barry’s name not locked behind figuring out crew rooms), release the non-core terminal and the map to the player along with the 99 camera and make the second mission be filling out a second manifest of when and what room each major disaster occurred in (So the player is forced to spot the research lab situation using the 99 camera), and a third manifest of everyone’s vital 999-persons wristband check-in at particular times: the location of the wristband at the check-in time and if they are 1: alive, 2: injured/unconscious/dying, 3: dead, or 4: wristband not attached to a human body because it got removed, dissolved or… etc. Only after filling most of those two manifests out can the Zero endgame be unlocked. And in the process of filling out those two new manifests, it’s extremely likely the player is going to catch on that there’s a secret thirteenth crew member sneaking around sabotaging things… only it’s way worse then the player could have imagined.
Switching to a system like that would have also fixed two of the weakest points of the story: the weird artifact disaster side of the story which seemed to be second fiddle to the people and the slugs, and the lameness of timepoint 17 vs timepoint 16 which should have felt like a big moment because you had to do an whole unlock sequence to get there. The postgame wristband check-in would be a lot more interesting because you would pinpoint that certain characters had gone all the way to Va■■■■■m.