2 | LGG | LAST-MINUTE MAGIC
2 | LGG | LAST-MINUTE MAGIC
by: Ryan Veeder
Progress:
- I ran out of turns after around 45 minutes of gameplay and received a horrendous final score of 7 out of 30. IF Comp did not, in fact, improve my parser skills that much I guess.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This game does not really engage much with horror as a genre (at least, of what I saw), but I wouldn’t say it’s off-theme. It has magic and takes place on Halloween, after all! I could see a case for some mild body horror maybe with some of the unusual events that happen with the amulets, but the tone is really not that unsettling. If there’s more horror-themed stuff that happens, I simply didn’t get there as indicated by my abysmal progress.
Things I Appreciated:
-
My favorite aspect of the game was the sense of discovery as to how the eyestones and amulets worked together. It was interesting to test out the different combinations and see what might be possible in the world. For instance, when a squirrel prompted me with a reminder that raccoons liked digging in the trash, I immediately equipped the combination of “movement” + “raccoon” to see if that would help my character overcome their unwillingness to dig in the trash by better embodying a raccoon. That specific example didn’t work, but I appreciated the intrigue of the unique magic mechanics that got me thinking about how I could weaponize the combinations I had available to me to accomplish tasks. I was really starting to get into the game mechanics by the time it was over.
-
I enjoyed the light and humorous tone of the game. Other than the time limit element, it was engaging to explore and see what wacky moments I might encounter. I’d describe the overall tone as like, “zany midwestern,” featuring things like a grotesque taxidermied muskie on the wall of a dive bar. As the game dryly remarks, “Its teeth are upsetting.”
Miscellaneous Comments:
-
I found this game to be somewhat hostile in terms of approaching it from a position of naivety about this subgenre of parser games (I have never played a game like this before). For instance, I tried going back to talk to Cimberly to see if I could get her to repeat the initial instructions (which had long since vanished off the top of the screen and I was having trouble remembering, and were also absent from my transcript because it started after those instructions) but she would only point at her watch, so it took me a while to understand that the trinkets, rather than the amulets, should be my primary focus. Memory was a significant issue in general—I kept forgetting what each stone did (it’s not inherently obvious to me why “olivine” or “pearl” is assigned to that function, for instance) and wasting turns re-examining them over and over again because I was not even considering how important the time limit was. Very late in the game, I decided to type “hint” to get back on track, and at that point the game told me I should’ve been taking notes all along. Well then.
That was the moment I realized that my approach to the game had been completely wrong and helped contextualize my experience a lot. I realized at that point that the entire game is one giant puzzle and you’re meant to play it over and over and over again until you can get all 30 (!) trinkets before time runs out. While this understanding came late, it makes me appreciate the game more because it now makes sense why anti-frustration features (such as: having the eyestones have obvious functions based on their names) are absent: it’s part of the challenge structured into the game to require you to take a ton of notes and memorize things and plan routes rather than just seamlessly playing. -
I didn’t fight with the parser too much, though there were some odd moments (like trying to put a singular trinket into the cauldron not being accepted). I think this is because optimally, you would dump all the trinkets on the final turn, so it doesn’t even occur to the game that you would want to do something so flagrantly inefficient as put a single trinket into the cauldron like I did trying to bank what little progress I had made. I included my transcript (that I managed to extract and convert into readable text) in case anything I did there is useful for the game programming… but I kind of doubt it, since I really did not play the game in a way that matched what I was actually “supposed” to be doing.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
- It was interesting to experience playing a game with “optimization” (requiring many playthroughs) as the goal. It was noticeably built in a much different way than parser games I’ve played. The structure sort of requires you to be frustrated because if you could solve it in one playthrough, it would not be a very satisfying optimization puzzle, now would it? What I’m left thinking about is how my understanding of the game dramatically shifted when the game told me I should be taking notes: had I received that comment from the game way earlier, I would’ve slowed down a lot and played more deliberately, but since I’m used to games with “infinite” turns, my default playstyle is to navigate quickly and somewhat recklessly under the assumption that I can come back to re-read the same information again later without penalty, rather than feeling pressured to absorb all the information at a slow pace. A lesson I would take from this for myself is to ask: what about the game’s presentation caused me to fail to recognize that it was cuing me to play slowly and attentively? It’s not like the game is entirely to blame, a lot of that just falls on me for playing it wrong. But it does nevertheless make me wonder how, if your game needs to be played slowly, how best to grab the attention of someone who is used to playing fast and skimming to get them to slow down.
Memorable Moment:
- By far the most exciting thing that happened was the first time I used the amber + buffalo combination, I hadn’t realized what the amber stone was doing yet and was really surprised and intrigued by what transpired.
DemonApologist_LastMinuteMagic.txt (54.9 KB)