I hit a good one with the second game on my random shuffle. (The first game is one we’ll be playing at the Seattle area IF meetup in a couple of weeks, and I decided to save that one for the meetup.) Playing as six-year-old Emma, The Impossible Bottle looks like a children’s game – and, indeed, that’s how it begins. However, it quickly morphs into something much more inside-out. Let’s just say that Mom’s book on locally Euclidean self-intersecting manifolds isn’t there solely for decoration. You’ll have to rearrange much of the house and look at every object from multiple perspectives in order to solve the puzzles in this game.
And there are lots of these puzzles. This is a puzzle-focused game more than a story-focused one, and its main puzzle mechanic is one that has some particularly strong features: The mechanic is easy to understand yet produces a large space of potential solutions. It also allows for lots of A-ha! moments as, after beating your ahead against a puzzle for a while, your perspective shifts just enough to see the right way forward. This is strong puzzle design. While I have yet to play any of the other games in this IFComp, I’d say The Impossible Bottle is among the better puzzle-focused games I’ve played in IFComps the past few years.
There is also plenty of attention to detail. Removing the batteries from an object has a correspondingly consistent effect in the rest of the game world. Room names change appropriately in response to your actions. There are several fitting IF references, including a classic one that’s particularly dear to my heart, as it helped inspire the first IF game I ever wrote.
All of this said, there were a few things about The Impossible Bottle that detracted from my enjoyment of the game. The solution space eventually got so big that I had trouble keeping everything in my head. A couple of the early puzzles can’t be solved until near the end of the game, and one of those in particular features a red herring. I kept trying to figure out how to put the objects together that I thought would solve it, wondering if I had run into some guess-the-verb problem. But I hadn’t; it was just the wrong solution. And I got quite frustrated with the most complicated puzzle in the game because I knew essentially what I needed to do but couldn’t quite see how to put the objects together in the way the game wanted me to. That was the first time I resorted to the hints (and I used the hints a few more times by the end). Perhaps a little more attention to focusing the player on the right way to do things (without completely giving it away) would have helped here.
Still, if you’re a fan of puzzly IF games with a consistent mechanic, you’ll enjoy The Impossible Bottle. Not only is it well-implemented, it is among the better puzzle-focused games I’ve played in IFComp the past few years.
An Exercise for the Reader 