It's not unknown for IF to pull a sort of bait-and-switch with its genre--i.e., giving the player an initial premise that fits into one genre, which suddenly gives way to an unexpected development that throws the story into a different genre entirely. Trinity did it, to some extent (well, tourism isn't really a genre, but stumbling into a surreal fantasyesque dimension was a shift), and Once and Future did something similar (with somewhat peculiar results due to the divergence between the feelies--which studiously avoided any implication that the game wasn't all about war--and the manual, which referred, among other things, to a sword suitable for summoning spirits). Break-In takes those precedents and runs with them: there are several genres all going on at once, with no Big Transitional Event to indicate that the initial premise has yielded to something else. (The end of the game returns to the original plotline, with no acknowledgment of the wacky stuff that's gone on.) As in, the game conflates your ostensible mission--as a freelance burglary artist, to break into a home and retrieve some plans--with silly surreal stuff--chicken-dragons and such--and also with conventional fantasy, casually mixing all three together. There are some explanations provided, but they're not particularly convincing, and they're largely provided after the fact--i.e., there are no warnings that the game is about to take a sharp turn. There's nothing inherently wrong with all this, I suppose, but it does sort of destroy the immersive aspect of the story--the player constantly saying "okay, what's going on NOW?" generally is not particularly immersed. Similarly, while pieces of the setting are well rendered, it's so incoherent--things are juxtaposed that can't really be logically juxtaposed--that the player tends to give up trying to picture the scene.
The fluidity of the genre boundaries isn't the main problem here, though--it's the game design. It's not all that difficult to render the game unfinishable in unexpected ways--e.g., by failing to properly manage inventory before a change of scene, or by failing to pick up a hidden object before leaving an area that, it turns out, you won't be able to revisit. There's lots more of that than there needs to be, and it makes it difficult to enjoy the silliness of the game--inventory management is about a prosaic a task as IF offers. The hint system, which is helpful in some areas but completely neglects others, doesn't help much. Worse, there are quite a few bugs-- some fatal, others merely irritating. Break-In is not especially polished--there are writing errors here and there along with the bugs--and the rough-edges feel often distracts from the game. There are some clever puzzles-- oddly, the one nominated for an XYZZY is far from the game's best; there are others that are much more creative--but some rely on rather large logical leaps, and one in particular is hampered by a lack of alternative solutions.
It's a shame because, taken the right way, the game is actually very funny--the implicit premise is that spies after the end of the Cold War are reduced to concocting ridiculous projects to keep themselves busy, and the notion of espionage artists dealing with things like giant chickens is, at bottom, pretty amusing. The game may not be particularly immersive, but it's got a fair measure of wit, as in the following:
By the doormat lies a brown-paper parcel, tied up with a length of string. It's probably just one of the Prof's favourite things.Or this:
>get shoot The shoot is attached to some kind of model or pendant, which appears to be of an orange alien in a green dress dancing wildly. What a weird thing to have buried in your garden! It has several 'arms' of different lengths all pointing upwards, and each with the same cone shape as the main 'body'. There's nothing in the way of a head, the cone just rounds to a blunt point. Maybe something fell off in the hole. >examine alien No, on second thoughts, its actually just a knobbly carrot. You were holding it upside down.Here, the burglar/spy persona of the PC comes across well--you ascribe suspicious or fantastic properties to everything--and it would benefit the game if that persona were more often in evidence. After all, the beginning of the story sees the PC pondering the course of his career in rather weighty terms--"Still, its not petty thieving. It's for national security, which is different"--and it seems like there's plenty of humor to be mined from the PC's reaction to all the silliness. E.g. (not from the game--just my suggestion): "You reflect sourly that none of your training at M5 prepared you for giant chickens. An oversight, clearly." As it is, if you don't find the chickens funny, you won't find the game funny (and those chickens do get tiresome pretty quickly).
Break-In is a game with considerable potential but not entirely successful implementation, in other words. Had the author chosen to make more of the story and PC, and less of the goofiness, the result might have been both funny and intriguing; as it is, there are some nicely done bits (intelligent puzzles, well-described settings) and a lot of mistakes. Try it only if you're in a very peculiar mood.