Nire Bryce

I picked this up for the nostalgia trip—I came back to it over and over again as a young child but never managed to make much headway on the riddles. As an adult, though, in addition to being endlessly charmed by the CGI/FMV hybridization, I was deeply impressed by how thoughtfully designed the game is.

The player is challenged to solve seven scientific riddles in order to satisfy a rogue AI and persuade it to divert a meteoroid before it collides with earth in five days' time. Doing so involves a point-and-click mixture of learning scientific facts and applying them to interactive puzzles, eventually yielding some object that you can submit as a riddle solution.

On the surface this is fairly standard mid-90s fare, although it's clear that the creators had a lot of fun cramming it full of goofs, science facts, and references to the Bill Nye show. But there's also a keen eye here towards the way the player approaches the game: although Nye Labs is fairly open to exploration, the puzzles are set up to gently guide you through in a particular order, gating challenges on one another or just on exploration through the space.

It's even clear that my childhood mode of play, to fail over and over again to actually stop the meteoroid, was an intended pattern. Very little in the game is mechanically off-limits. Instead, it's almost exclusively blocked by knowledge. Once you're aware of how to solve one or another riddle (or even enter the one explicitly locked area of the lab), you can do it instantly in your next session. The game expects the player to learn over time not just in terms of science but in terms of the space it creates.