The game begins with you at your desk doing menial tasks, and it can end there very quickly as well unless you the player decide to put down your menial tasks at a certain point and go explore the rest of the office. In other words, the game gives you a quick "ending" after about five moves and doesn't emphasize that this ending is suboptimal. In an IF Competition rife with one-room or one-puzzle games, the size of the story file might be the only thing keeping the player from missing most of the game. This is an issue mainly because the game keeps you from wandering away at first, and provides minimal motivation for you to get up and wander around; it's not clear _why_ you do what you do. The problem of unclear motivations recurs later, as the game transforms into, well, whatever it is: some of your actions have no obvious reasons. The author, to be fair, was trying to explore the idea of a protagonist motivated by evil ends--or, at least, ends with which the player cannot easily sympathize. It's an underdeveloped area in IF, and this is an intriguing stab at it. But without some flashes of intuition in that regard, the player is likely to discover what the character's goals are through the hints, which doesn't exactly have the same effect.

As the game progresses, though, and the genre/setting becomes more clear, the author delivers several excellent shock-twists in ways reminiscent of Delusions, and just as effective. Once the player accepts the premise (and figures out what it is), Little Blue Men is terrific sci-fi in a vaguely absurdist way. Some lengthy speeches by NPCs could have come straight out of schlocky movies or books, but that just adds to the overall effect here: the author's main satirical theme is the line between irritating office banality and sheer evil, and the game plays the dichotomy for all it's worth. The puzzles largely reinforce that: most involve putting conventional office objects to new, devious uses, or turning humdrum objects into weapons, or conquering perennial office irritations (like the blaring smoke detector or the fickle vending machine). The cross-genre nature of the game leaves a lot of unanswered questions, of course--more backstory would help--but the dystopia part is so thoroughly done that it works well nonetheless.

One of the more interesting aspects of Little Blue Men is its separation between goal and motivation. The character's goals are not always clear; it is clear that the character does not anticipate the ending of the game before it happens. Instead, the goals are more personal, more centered on the self: your emotional balance is somewhere between "steamed" and "frosty," and your object at any given moment is to become more frosty and eliminate those things that make you steamed. Once the player accepts that premise--that your objective is to get rid of annoyances--it drives the game, yet the author never provides any goals larger than that. The result is, in a sense, a rather narcissistic game--the importance of everything around lies in how it makes you feel--which is, no doubt, just what the author intended. One of the questions that Little Blue Men poses is whether getting rid of those things that annoy you leads to anything better: the ambivalent nature of the ending suggests otherwise.

In fact, one of the best, and most frustrating things, about the game is the ending: the effect is both surreal and disturbing. It is not clear that the player has "won" when he or she reaches the end of the game; there is good reason, in fact, for thinking that the end of the story is merely another ending, no better than the "deaths" you can die earlier on. This is a Zarfian ending taken a step further: whereas other games have given a clear resolution without allowing the player to "win," in the sense of resolving the problem or riding into the sunset with the treasure, Blue Men raises the distinct possibility that it might have been better not to reach that ending at all. It's a unique feeling that, unfortunately, doesn't necessarily make for a satisfying game experience, assuming the player realizes what's going on at all.

Indeed, Little Blue Men works somewhat better on the theoretical level than as a game, though it's still a good game. The author seems to have set out to demolish certain IF tropes, and, give him credit, he does. Many of his points are sufficiently subtle that they're easily missed--after all, not many games attempt such things. The game itself, though funny in spots, doesn't work as well as the theory behind it: the unclear or questionable motivations are part of it, but it's also that the cross-genre feel keeps the player off balance, wondering where the story will go next, for most of the game. Those not interested in the theory of game design might well get to the end, say "what was THAT all about?", and quit. Still, perfect marriages between entertainment and subversion/experimentation in IF are rare--Spider and Web comes close; not many others do--and Little Blue Men does well to get the player through the game and raise some intriguing questions.

This is, in short, an interesting effort, perhaps best suited for those experienced in IF and willing to question its conventions. There's lots of intriguing stuff going on in Little Blue Men, enough that I gave it a 9 in this year's competition.