mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Happy Star Wars Day! Boy do I have a weird one this year.

Night Shift was not originally conceived as a Star Wars game, and it only sort of is one. Little-known British studio Attention to Detail were developing a game about a factory worker frantically running around fixing parts of a massive machine that keeps breaking down. They pitched it to Lucasfilm Games, who liked the idea but asked that it use their existing IPs. So ATD redesigned the game so that the harried, downtrodden worker is laboring under cruel taskmasters at "Industrial Might and Logic," and the factory is churning out mass-produced Star Wars action figures made of plastic derived from toxic waste.

I thought it was incredible that Lucasfilm would publish a game overtly satirizing the Star Wars marketing machine, so I had to check it out. Now having played it (well, as much of it as I could get through), what I think is more puzzling is that they'd publish a game that is so oddly designed and confusing to play.

Things start out well enough. You choose to play as Fred or Fiona Fixit, and then receive an assignment from your mean boss to produce a specific number of toys during your shift. On the first level, you have to make at least five Stormtrooper dolls before the candle burns all the way down.



When you start, the factory isn't working, and you're supposed to platform around finding where the breakdowns are and fixing them with an array of provided tools. The first problem I had was that I could move left and right, but could not jump to the platforms or use any tools. My intuition was to select tools with the letters next to each icon, but apparently the letters are decorative. Upon further investigation, I learned that this version of the game can only be controlled with the numpad, which my laptop doesn't have, so I had to fire it up on my actual gaming PC. Okay, this is serious business now!

Accessing the tools is pretty cumbersome since you have to press space to activate the toolbar, numpad 4 and 6 to scroll, space again to lock in the selection, and numpad 5 to use. Mouse support would have helped this game a lot. I often found it difficult to tell whether I was using the tools correctly, because the same animation is used for success and failure, and if you try to use a tool where it's irrelevant it just pops you back to the default "hand" tool with no feedback on what happened.

Tools are single-use; once used they disappear. (Well, they're single-use except for the hand—good thing the IP the devs were forced to use wasn't Saw!) I think it was a big missed opportunity not to have an animation of your character hurling the wrench violently away for no reason after using it. Anyway, sometimes new tools spawn that you can collect, which I think also gives you points, though I'm not sure. Many tools have icons that are hard to identify and I think some of them are only useful in later levels, but I figured out that you can use the green helium balloon to float up and the umbrella to parachute down the vertically scrolling factory.



Okay, so the UI is a little clunky. But the bigger problem I had was that it was totally opaque to me what I was supposed to be doing. The field of play is very visually cluttered, making it hard to parse which animations signal something's broken, which ones signal something's working, and which are decorative. It's also far from obvious what's a platform you can jump to and what's part of the background. (You can fall off the factory and "die," though you instantly respawn so I'm not sure what the point is.)

I did find and read a pdf of the manual, which was an experience in itself. It's presented as an in-universe employee handbook, which wasn't an uncommon sort of thing in this era of gaming, and often added to the fun and immersion. But, uh. In this case, they decided to convey the aggressive indifference of the Industrial Might & Logic overlords by having the handbook written on a typewriter where the lower case E didn't work.



But eventually the documentation does cough up some tips on the first few levels, which was also not uncommon in the pre-internet days. In the first level you have to use the wrench to close a valve, but I couldn't spot the leaking steam animation until I watched someone else play the level on Youtube. Closing the valve makes the machine start spitting out Stormtrooper heads, and kicking a button somewhere else (numpad 1 and 3 kick!) makes it start spitting out Stormtrooper bodies. I guess the first time I did this I got the timing wrong or something, because it ended up assembling them backwards and I couldn't figure out how to stop or undo it, so I failed the level and got fired.



I tried the level a few more times and eventually it worked, though I still don't know why! Everyone I saw covering this game on Youtube said it was absurdly hard, but I got the feeling that the difficulty was stemming less from the mechanics than from the unclear telegraphing of why things do or don't work. It feels like if you could just tell what you're doing, it would be straightforward. It's like playing an easy game blindfolded.

Admittedly I didn't play much more, because I didn't find it fun. There are 30 levels, but nobody I watched played more than a few either. Not all the levels are Star Wars themed, some are based on Indiana Jones or other Lucas games like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, but I think Star Wars is the most prominent IP.



I do think the underlying ideas had potential. It's like a cross between Lemmings and The Incredible Machine, neither of which had come out yet, so I guess it was ahead of its time! But what it lacks that those games have is any sense of how to introduce game mechanics to the player, build on their knowledge, and make the learning process feel intuitive. I'm sure the developers knew how their game worked, but they didn't know how to put themselves in the shoes of the player sitting down with it for the first time, which turns out to be a pretty important skill for a game designer to have.

Night Shift, for some reason, is not commercially available among the many bundles of classic and not-so-classic Star Wars games that go on sale this time of year, but you can play it in your browser on the Internet Archive if you want. I think it runs a little fast there, though nobody seems to agree on how fast it was originally supposed to run, which feels somehow appropriate.