The principal joke going on involves the problem of PC identity. Conventional modern-day IF has developed a variety of ways for the player to "discover" who he or she is--someone calls you by your name, you find your name written in some obvious place--that make the identity-assumption process less clunky than would a simple "You're Joe Blow." Old-style IF, by contrast, generally never gave the PC a name or any other indicia of identity at all; there was just a task to do. In 9:05, in most significant ways, you're the latter--you don't have an identity of your own other than "burglar"--but everything the game does is set up to make you think you're happening upon your own identity as you wander around. The game does this rather artfully--you see "a wallet" and "a driver's license" rather than "your" possessions, which is unobtrusive enough that most players don't notice it in the ho- hum house setting. You solve the "puzzle" of figuring out where you work by looking at your ID, so the game doesn't need to actually mislead you by calling the office your workplace. And at the end, there you are, suckered into assuming someone else's identity because you found some objects and assumed they were yours. ("I didn't mean it, officer. I've been playing too much IF.")

Similarly, what your character does, or rather has done--commit theft and murder--is quite in tune with classic old-style IF, except that the setting is wrong: you're not in a fantasy or sci- fi setting, where it's "okay" to rob and kill indiscriminately, you're in the suburbs. The mundane apparent premise--get dressed, get to work--also helps set this up, since the expectation engendered by such a promise is that you'll discover a plot somewhere along the way (i.e., something will happen to you to make the story less mundane), and the surprise is that non- mundane things are already going on. (In fact, owing to the knowledge gap between the player and the PC, the player mistakenly directs the PC to assume that mundane rather than highly bizarre and dangerous events are going on.)

One amusing parallel to this is that one persistent illogicality in house-setting IF--i.e., the game has to tell the PC all about the details of the house he lives in as if he's seeing them for the first time--is remedied: the surroundings actually are new (well, relatively--you saw them the previous night) to both PC and player. The game doesn't really force you to figure out much about the home or anything else, so it doesn't do as much with this angle as it might have--but it's still an interesting sidelight. (It does take away virtually every intuitive shortcut, however--you have to open doors before going through them--which does convey that you're not used to your environment to some extent.) Likewise, the appraising eye of the PC--you evaluate everything, including the comfort of the living room (limited with no stereo, DVD player, or TV, which are in your trunk, of course) and the neighborhood (too much crime, you say) makes little sense in most IF--who bothers to appraise his everyday surroundings on every viewing?--but plenty of sense here. Beyond all that, though, 9:05 says something interesting about the way most players approach IF: give us a task rather than simply a setting to explore, make the task seem urgent, and we'll spend very little time actually poking around. (When "undo" is available, there's no real reason for not at least looking at what's given.) There are a variety of commands other than LOOK UNDER BED that hint that not all is as it appears: SMELL, for instance, and EXAMINE CLOTHING, and EXAMINE ME certainly indicates that something is up. A more-than-cursory look at the setting in 9:05 should suggest to the player that something's wrong, in other words, and yet it appears that most people, goal- oriented by the initial phone call, didn't catch on until the end.

At any rate, in the end, it's a good joke.