The premise: you're a soldier in a nameless war against a nameless enemy, stuck in a field with one leg on a land mine, with a malfunctioning radio. Unlike some other one-location games, the puzzles are not available at the outset for you to find; rather, they come to you, one by one, and you have a limited time to deal with each one. The experience is consequently rather limiting; the game attempts to make you feel powerless, and it does that quite well, with the exception of one puzzle solution that breaks the "powerless" feel somewhat (though there's a good reason for it). Among the obvious ironies of the game is that the protagonist is forced to depend on the inhabitants of the country he has been happily destroying, but the game doesn't do as much as it might have with that idea.

Indeed, it's hard to say what Persistence of Memory is about, other than the superficial plot. If your encounters with the natives are supposed to be cathartic, or cause you to Rethink This Whole War Thing, the text provides only oblique hints to that effect. One message is that failure to communicate causes waste and destruction, a point well made, but is that the point of the story? It's hard to tell. Perhaps it's merely that certain experiences humanize an otherwise faceless enemy--not all that groundbreaking an idea, but then again just about any thoughts on war in the IF medium are new, as noted. Whatever the underlying message, the story works well; the game changes your motivations and thoughts effectively over its course, from "getting off this land mine" to more complex goals not necessarily centered on survival. Or, alternately, one could view your motivations as still focused on personal survival even as you realize the consequences of war upon the villagers, and your internal conflicts are a product of your guilt. Persistence of Memory is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations; it is to the author's credit that he doesn't fill in many of the blanks. The scene is vividly described: one particularly well-done aspect involves the various physical discomforts you encounter over the course of the day, stuck in your awkward position, developing cramps and soreness and becoming more and more thirsty. (On the other hand, the game doesn't make as much as it might of your psychological discomfort.)

The puzzles themselves aren't particularly hard; most of the solutions are fairly obvious. There are no multiple solutions. Indeed, it is almost impossible to deviate at all from the main narrative path and still complete the game, meaning that there is no replayability here. That's not a major drawback, given the nature of the story--the goal is less to challenge the player than to present some ideas--but the small size of the game makes it likely that, just when the player is settling into the character and the setting, the game ends, and there really isn't much incentive to go back and try again. (The message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want us to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time with them.) To the extent this game works, then, it does as thought experiment or as a statement about the nature of war; no one should play it for the puzzles. That's not, of course, a bad thing. But, as with Photopia, it isn't entirely clear that this story _needed_ to be set in the IF medium to be effective; this one has somewhat more claim to interactivity than does Photopia, since there _are_ problems to solve, but it does lay a rather linear path. The one-room aspect reinforces that; more so than in the other '98 one-room entries, the premise is a limitation, a confinement, and you the player do actually feel confined. That sense of limitation pervades the game and constrains the available experience considerably.

The Hugo game engine is up to the task, though the task, technically, isn't all that much. The game does handle one action not easily translated into IF-speak quite well, though, accepting a wide variety of syntaxes and synonyms. Moreover, the WAIT command is altered for the occasion: time passes until something of note happens, rather than 1 or 3 or 10 turns. This proves very handy, though the player might find the game unspeakably boring if he or she does not realize that the action comes to the character, rather than the character producing the action. This and other functions are handled quite well; the hint system is minimally necessary but thorough nonetheless.

Persistence of Memory does, I think, what it was trying to do: it's a short piece of IF set in wartime that raises complex questions of a soldier's personal responsibility and the needless loss wrought by war. It does all that reasonably well, enough so to merit a 7; it doesn't, unfortunately, work quite as well as a game.