Verde Station

Developer: Duelboot | Released: 2014 | Genre: Adventure, Facile

This one barely took an hour to get through – I almost put it in a Short Sessions blog post instead.

It felt crude and simple in the beginning, like a small fan mission for e.g. Half-Life. I woke up in a space station – all alone of course – and walked from a bedroom to a greenhouse, then to a lounge, the kitchen, and back into the greenhouse. I was about to quit at that point, but then I noticed that something was different. Turned out that time had passed when looping through the sections.

This immediately made the experience more interesting. I kept circling around in the sections to observe the changes. This led to a new location and a surprise. And as a free game, I’d say the surprise is worth giving it a shot – just don’t expect awesomeness.

Spoiler: Observations

The sound was missing at first. I had to fiddle with the audio in the settings to make it work.
Lots of terminal menu stuff testing the sections, switching power on and off, etc.
That was a tacky walking sound.
To make the domino rows of books start tumbling, I had to drop a book on the first one.
In the lounge I could put a floppy disk in the computer and read some text. I wonder how many from Generation Z understands this connection?
I liked the surprises – yes, there were two in a row. The first one revealed the outside of the space station to be a stage as I rebooted everything, making it all seem fake. But when I popped out of the airlock from this stage, I actually dropped into space after all. Neat turnaround.

Pros

The surprise at the end makes it worth playing as it’s free on Steam.
Some interesting things to try out in the terminals, like simulated DOS commands.