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Significantly less than the sum of its parts, January 12, 2024After finishing this game, I was surprised to learn that it placed a respectable 4th of 27 entries in the 2007 IF Comp. This is remarkable -- it clearly demonstrates how much higher the average quality of comp entries has climbed over the course of the last decade and a half.
This game is very competently programmed in Inform 6 and presented no bugs during various playthroughs. The writing is serviceable, and I noticed only a handful of typographical errors (all of which were misplaced homonyms). The story, however, is a mish-mash of unrelated elements that create essentially no synergy.
In terms of "marketing materials," the game patterns itself after the Infocom style -- and especially after Planetfall. As with that game, feelies include a military service ID card and various documents relevant to the PC's new career. The feelies also imply that this game takes place in the same universe as that commercial-era classic, with the player character being the sibling of Planetfall's recently-enlisted Ensign Seventh Class who serves aboard the S.P.S. Feinstein. The most innovative item among the feelies of Across the Stars was the sample transcript, which covers the player character's experience when first joining the crew of the ship aboard which the story begins. (This is a departure from Infocom's practice, which presented sample transcripts from stories that were similar but unrelated.) The ostensible background provided by the feelies is wholly irrelevant to actual gameplay, though, and they can be skipped without losing anything of value.
The game itself is difficult to describe, because it mixes several elements and styles without committing to any of them enough to warrant a strong categorization. The basic segments of the plot are as follows: 1) (Spoiler - click to show)sabotage your ship while avoiding the occasional search by pirates who have captured the rest of the crew, 2) (Spoiler - click to show)explore an ancient temple from an alien culture to learn about their culture and history, 3) (Spoiler - click to show)defeat some dangerous creatures and rescue an NPC, 4) (Spoiler - click to show)get to the NPC's ship and activate its emergency beacon so that you can both be rescued. One or two of these segments might have served as the whole plot of a modern comp game; here, each is treated so breezily that it feels like four half-stories and zero complete ones.
In terms of richness of setting, most of it is found in plot segment 2, which -- oddly -- seems almost wholly optional. In fact, the IFDB-linked walkthrough (which seems to have been for an earlier version of the game) pretty much skips this part. It appears that much of it was grafted on later, and complications to the main plot added to require engagement with these new pieces.
If this was the development strategy, then it is easiest to explain the game's shortcomings as simply the result of it not reflecting any integrated vision of a whole. However, this is a fatal flaw, because in its final form the plot basically requires the player character to (Spoiler - click to show)secure the primary magical artifact of an ancient world religion solely in order to use it as a light source!
At first I thought that this aspect of gameplay was the result of the authors allowing plenty of freedom in the path that the player takes through the game, such that being a good guy is optional. I would have respected that, but review of the source code suggests that this is part of the critical path to reaching the end. I found the overall experience to be somewhat distasteful.
The authors themselves seemed to have trouble coming to grips with the game as a whole; the subtitle of "the Ralckor Incident" seems an odd choice, as the subtitular creature really only figures prominently into plot segment 3. If tasked with naming the game, I might suggest (Spoiler - click to show)"the Taking of the Supalace" (segment 1) or (Spoiler - click to show)"Prophecy of the Protector" (segment 2) or even (Spoiler - click to show)"Escape from Brakis VI" (segment 4). The pacing and structure of the game made it seem to me as though the proposed segment 2 title would fit best, but given the resolution of that segment it would really only do so in an ironic manner.
Playing this game may still be worthwhile as an exercise for the would-be author, because on the local scale of individual rooms, objects and actions there is much to admire about this work. I would not really recommend it to players as entertainment, however. If you want action-adventure, a rich fictional history with layers of meaningful symbolism, engaging and purposeful NPCs, and epic quests to save a world, then you will likely be disappointed by this work that seems to offer all of these things but ends up delivering none.