16 | FAMILIAR PROBLEMS
16 | FAMILIAR PROBLEMS
by: Dercomai
Progress:
- I reached the end in about 50 minutes, with moderate use of the walkthrough. (I was a bit nervous to play this one after the Dog Arson Incident™/Biscuitgate™ in Miss Gosling’s Last Case, but the walkthrough/hints were just right for me and avoided causing me to death spiral while playing like happened there!)
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- Overall, this is wacky comedy horror, so the horror elements aren’t really that threatening due to the tone. For instance, one can imagine an alternate depiction of an infestation of self-replicating information being legitimately terrifying, but because of the mood of the piece, it’s more funny than anything. It’s also a case where you are playing as what would often be the villain of a narrative (and arguably, still kind of is. Even the hints have BlobApologist propaganda in them, how delightful!).
Things I Appreciated:
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I thought this was an entertaining game; a lot of academia humor. (I especially appreciated the gentle skewering of the music theory department with its “penthemitonic scale” and microtones, but there were many amusing jokes throughout the rooms.) My favorite environmental element was probably the changing notice board with IF community in-jokes that I’m now marginally better equipped to appreciate given the last few months.
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The scope of the game felt right—there isn’t a huge number of rooms, but the puzzles are still fairly difficult. I liked the exclamation points directing me to the rooms that I could do more in, it helped focus my attention. In a similar sense, there isn’t a huge number of powers that you can gain, but it’s just enough that I did not feel like it was worth my time to try every command, and just focused more on trying to think about which commands would actually make sense for the situations that I was in. I had a few “aha” moments as a result, which made those puzzles feel satisfying.
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I especially liked the visual presentation. The seafoam green interactable text color is especially pleasing, and the game feels polished both visually and mechanically. The minimap at the top of the screen also contributes a lot to easing navigation and directing attention to puzzles.
Miscellaneous Comments:
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After thinking about the puzzles, the one that doesn’t sit right with me is “resonate” being the solution for the bowl of arsenic. Something that is full of powder wouldn’t resonate well at all, right? It would be dampened by the presence of the powder. Like imagine hitting a metal bowl with your fist to cause it to ring. If it’s empty, works great. If you poured some sand in it, and tried again, it wouldn’t work. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal because one could either read the walkthrough or just… through process of elimination, resonate the bowl, but it felt like a distinctly unnatural solution to me.
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I had a minor issue with the prepare/escape mechanic on the minimap. So, if you prepare a shell, it puts an O on the map in that room. After I learned that clicking on a room would cause you to automatically travel there, I would instinctively click the “O” on the minimap expecting to teleport using the shell, because the O was representing the shell. Instead, clicking on it caused me to walk there and made the gong timer run out. This isn’t a big deal since you can just… retry things, but it did cause me to have to reset the gong a few times while trying to overcome the instinct to click on the O to travel instead of using the “escape” verb.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The main thing I would study here is the minimap, and the different kinds of information it communicates. It directs your attention to certain rooms that have puzzles that you can solve, and even changes to alert you that you’ve done something meaningful (for instance: an exclamation point spontaneously occurs when you ring the gong).
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I also thought the verbs were creative and interesting. It was nice to see a different-than-standard set of verbs that nevertheless made sense. It helps to refresh the player’s mind with a new set of verbs to avoid a lot of the assumptions people might be bringing to standard verbs. Though, to be honest, I didn’t play this by entering parser commands, as I just clicked the links instead for this one. But this is a good example of how to control and present the verbs to a player in a way that sidesteps some of the parser game jankiness that occurs when the player is just assumed to clairvoyantly know which verbs to try.
Memorable Moment:
- I think my favorite moment was receiving the “transmute” power. I kept encountering what I was referring to myself as “Chekhov’s suspiciously specific metals” where objects were described as being pure nickel, zinc, gold, lead, etc., and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that information. So when I finally gained the ability to do something with that information, I was really excited.