healyg | IF Comp Review: Final Exam (Reply)

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Jack Whitham's Final Exam.

Final Exam is a heavily puzzle-based game about an exam for a futuristic administrative position that goes wrong thanks to some kind of cyber-attack. We're not given too many details about either the attack or the setting itself; there's some hints that much of the world may be experienced in VR simulations, but nothing too concrete.

Anyway, after a handhold-y introduction, you have to save your organization through some technical wizardry involving cables and robots and junk. I had to work from a walkthrough almost the entire game, so I'm not too sure about how fair or good the puzzles are; most of them are fiddly manipulate-the-machine type puzzles, and there's a lot of mapping to do since the rooms are really spread out. For what it's worth, though, I did end up liking the game, despite a few minor problems here and there (like the inconsistant handling of identically named objects).

Conclusion: If you want a game that's just one big puzzle without a whole lot of plot, there are worse games than Final Exam for that.