Recent reviews by Yancho1

Interesting concept, somewhat flawed execution. The game presents a "choose your own solution" to the climate and biodiversity crisis that we face with some interesting options. However, I think that the game suffers from some oversights that make my recommendation less than 100%

First, I encountered several bugs in the game, particularly with the disasters and power generation. At some point my power sources apparently stopped generating because there were constant blackouts and brownouts despite my generation being apparently fine. I also got a "megadams" event when I had cut my hydropower down to 10% - very strange!

I also think some of the tech options suffer from biased thinkinh/motivated reasoning. Advanced nuclear tech is portrayed as completely unworkable, but somehow I'm supposed to believe that next Gen photovoltaics will magically increase production by 40% and we're super close to huge breakthroughs in battery tech? If we're going to gloss over engineering challenges like that, it seems unfair to declare tested technology with some proven success (nuclear reprocessing and fast neutron/breeder reactors) as unrealistically difficult to implement.

I think it's an interesting idea to show that yes, we can solve this crisis if we act now, but I fear that the game can have some confirmation bias in it. For example, no form of more sustainable animal agriculture (ie as practiced by traditional herders with modern improvements to animal health) was ever offered to me. It would have been interesting to see that sort of option portrayed rather than the somewhat binary choice of "ban meat or not"

Anyway, definitely an interesting game, some neat ideas in it (electrification woo!) but subtly biased in certain ways.

I really loved this game as a kid, and playing it again now I can see why. I actually started replaying it on an old flash portal back in April, and with 20 hours sunk into it I'm only about halfway through Chapter 3 (the longest of the chapters). This game is a relic of an era where people poured their hearts and souls into games that in the end would go on the internet for free. (On a side note, wow, flash game portals were really exploitative, as they did *not* pay well for these labors of love). MARDEK is well worth the ten dollars right now.

Why play it here instead of a flash portal? Well, besides supporting the creator, and avoiding Flash's eventual death, you also get a significant improvement in terms of sound quality and smoothness. Even on a modern computer, the nature of flash makes the game stutter a bit on the more particle-heavy attacks when playing online; this offline version seems to avoid that issue.

The story and gameplay definitely hold up and are just as engaging as they were 10 years ago. A few elements are a little juvenile or mean, but I think we've all grown since then.