It's arguable, of course, whether cramming a game full of story enhances its enjoyability; at bottom, it's a matter of taste, and depends in large part on whether the player is interested in the story at hand. It also depends, of course, on how well integrated into the game the story is, and in this respect in particular, Delusions shines: the puzzles serve the purposes of the plot, and the challenges are hurdles that reflect crucial discoveries or roadblocks in the story. They are, to be sure, far from easy; I doubt I ever would have guessed a few of them without the aid of the hint menu--but they are distinctly not puzzles thrown into an unrelated story. The charm of this is that puzzle-solving and figuring out the plot are usually one and the same task, so there isn't a sense of "gee, I've got to figure out how to do this to move the story along"--usually, at least.

To say much about the story beyond the initial premise would spoil it, so...you are part of a research team doing VR simulations, and as the game begins, you are busy trying to debug one of them, a scenario in which you play a fish dodging hungry predators. The opening few puzzles within the simulation are an appealing introduction and help draw the player into the game, though I was hoping that the fish scene would play more of a role in the game than it does. At any rate, the plot thickens appropriately once you've done what you need to do as a fish, in a variety of unexpected ways.

In one key respect, Delusions has an odd split personality: there are sections of the game where the plot is more or less told to you via several screens of text, and there are other sections where the game gives you virtually no guidance and you're left to piece things together from some fairly obscure clues. Both parts, to be sure, make some sense within the plot of the game, but the gameplay is a bit disorienting as a result (not, of course, inconsistently with the tone of the story). Early discoveries, furthermore, encourage the player to view what he's told with skepticism, and yet the plot elements you're told later are essentially true. In some respects, this can't be avoided--there's too much story here for the player to discover it all by himself, without resort to diary entries or some other such tired device, and certain points simply have to come out via screens of text. But given that one of the most intriguing plot elements comes out through discovery, there's still a bit of tension there.

That element bears mention because Babel, a 1997 competition entry, did something similar, though the author has since said that he hadn't played Delusions and came up with the idea by himself. Though both use it effectively, Delusions tries something more ambitious that ends up slowing things down: the required set of actions has a sequence in mind (with some, but only some, variation allowed), meaning that, once the player gets the idea, the process boils down to walking around and manipulating objects rather than discovering as the plot presumably intended. It would work better if there were more obvious logic to the sequence, but there wasn't any that I could guess, and the eventual conclusion was apparent long before the chain was over. (Whereas--perhaps I'm just dense--I didn't guess the corresponding revelation in Babel.) The post hoc explanations for why you don't tumble to this discovery before seem just a little thin, moreover.

This is nitpicking, though, because the plot does work very well indeed. Particularly effective, even though frustrating, is the middle section of the game, which repeats ad infinitum until you find a way to break out of the loop. The puzzles associated with this are difficult but fair: everything is put together logically, and the tension, when it seems like your plan might get foiled, is real. The nightmarish aspect of this section of the game derives mostly from the presence of a certain NPC, and it's to the author's credit that the NPC, though he provides virtually no interaction--he talks to you, you can't say much back--is an intimidating presence. His dialogue is well-written and doesn't feel too heavily borrowed from standard science fiction, though then again I wouldn't know. Also very good--and thoroughly coded; I didn't find much that broke the spell--is a certain change in your environment that you cause in order to get through the scene. Arguably, the NPC might have figured out what you're up to, but it's still a memorable moment. The only real flaw in the middlegame is a repeated message that you really want to get out of this--it loses its effectiveness after the first time or so, I found. The endgame, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to what comes before--the dramatic confrontation could come from any thriller, and the final resolution just didn't feel climactic to me. There are some clever puzzles--though one depends on finding a hidden object at a time when you weren't aware that you needed it--and the ending does tie up most of the plot questions, but, as far as the story goes, the middle part works best.

Technically, Delusions is impressive. I found very few bugs, most actions have synonyms, and there are several code tricks involving subtle changes in the game environment, or in the game's responses, that work well. The writing is error-free and effective throughout, in a way that moves the plot along without drawing attention to itself. A computer is thoroughly done, though it's a bit tedious to use--then again, seeing as it's running a "Windows 2000" system, perhaps that's design on the author's part. There are very few obvious illogicalities, even accepting the game's various plot twists; the game is well-designed, well-crafted.

At bottom, though, Delusions seems to aspire to be more than simply a well-crafted collection of puzzles, and that's where the difficulty comes in. There are Bigger Issues at stake in the puzzles you solve, and while the game does offer some food for thought, my problem with it is that those issues don't really affect what you do. Delusions is in many respects a better game than Tapestry, another 1996 competition entry that dealt with questions metaphysical, but Tapestry did force the player to weigh the problems and make decisions; here, except for one moment at the end of the game, you solve puzzles, largely. To be sure, this is a different sort of game than Tapestry, and it succeeds on an entirely different level--but in that there certainly are intriguing questions being raised throughout, and periodically mentioned in passing by this NPC or that, I wanted them to have more to do with your actions and decisions. Put another way, the player can more or less opt out of the thought-provoking bits of Delusions by breezing through the text and moving on to the next puzzle.

Theoretical objections aside, Delusions is an outstanding game in several respects, and if you missed the 1996 competition, this is without a doubt one of the entries you should check out now. Even if it gets a few things wrong, it does a whole lot of interesting stuff right.