19 | LGG | NICK NEAT-TRICK-TREAT
19 | LGG | NICK NEAT-TRICK-TREAT
by: Andrew Schultz
Progress:
- I reached the end of this game in (an admittedly dreadful effort on my part) 1 hour and 43 minutes. I made use of the walkthrough for either 2 or 3 of the solutions, but otherwise was able to struggle my way through most of them.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This is a game about trick-or-treating and is an entry that is more Halloween-themed than horror-themed, though I guess you could make a case for some very mildly spooky imagery here or there. Overall though, I wouldn’t describe this as a horror piece.
Things I Appreciated:
-
I really thought my experience from Why Pout would help me more than it actually did. It turns out that, just like there, this type of game is deceptively difficult. How many possible rhyme combinations could there even be? Even though I took about the same amount of time with a much shorter game here (meaning I did worse overall), I used the walkthrough significantly less in this case, so I feel like I was more capable of thinking through these puzzles. I do find this style of word game interesting, even if it causes me to get a bit batty. I like the way that it draws lateral thinking and creative ideas out of me, even when they are completely off-base.
-
I liked the eye power (when it worked) to help direct my attention to possible solutions. It gave just enough information to help me focus without completely giving away the answers.
-
The game had a straightforward, but coherent story. I know a game like this is more about the puzzle than the narrative, but the settings more or less made sense to me, as did the kinds of characters and obstacles that I encountered.
Miscellaneous Comments:
-
Respectfully, this game is an absolute menace. It took me 15 minutes to solve the very first command, because I was really struggling to figure out what phrase to direct my attention to. At different points throughout the game, I had issues because I was unable to pick up the cues as to what to rhyme (for example, I was continuing to make pointless guesses based on the location “And Eee-ing” not understanding that I had been cued to rhyme with “Randy Ring” instead.) I think in general, it’s good to start with an easier puzzle to help the player adjust to the game mechanic, but I found the first puzzle to be one of the hardest in the entire game. (The actual hardest being: the curled key solution). I guess this is pretty subjective though, maybe other players will have a radically different experience of the difficulty, but I can only really comment on my own.
-
Instead of going through the every glitch and weird thing I encountered, since a post-comp release is planned, I’ll just refer to my attached transcript as the exhaustive account of what happened while I was playing. I do hope it will be helpful! However, there are a few elements that I want to comment on in particular. When trying to solve the bonus points, I tried to take a break to work on other puzzles (figuring that refocusing my mind later would help draw more creative rhyme ideas out of me), only to find that I was blocked from re-entering that location because I had solved the main puzzle there. I think it should be either allowed for you to revisit areas to work on the bonus puzzles, or, it should be made very clear to the player that they will not be allowed to try again later. I also had some trouble with the relationship between the “eye” command and the bonus puzzles. For instance, for the final tree trolled puzzle, the eye command gave me 2 to 4, but the “missed” command at the end told me that the solution was actually “wee wold” which does not match that. That puzzle became impossible for me to solve because I had ruled out three-letter words based on the eye’s disinformation (I actually had guessed “we wold” even though that doesn’t make sense… because a lot of my more desperate guesses don’t really make sense, but the game didn’t tell me how close I was so I could recover.)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
- The importance of a balanced learning curve! Something I notice that I’ve really harped on as a player across a bunch of games (fairly or not) is command bottlenecking, especially right at the beginning. As a player, it takes me time to warm up. And not even just as a player, honestly. I remember in school in multiple choice exams I had a tic where I would often get only the first 1-2 questions of the exam wrong, and then have no issues for the rest once I had settled in. As annoying as tutorials are, I think I need time to enter super trivial commands that actually work so I can process the game-world that I’m in and adjust. Here, when faced with (what was to me) a steep cliff as the first obstacle, I floundered for a long time.
Memorable Moment:
- When the game told me off for submitting “geeky gay” (arguably a description of… myself) as an insult. I don’t know what to tell you, my ethical standards evidently decline when desperation sets in!
DemonApologist_NickNeatTrickTreat.txt (85.9 KB)
Okay, that ought to be a wrap for the nineteen anglophone Le Grand Guignol games! A big thank you to all these authors for a very creative and interesting set of games, I hope my comments weren’t too obnoxious!
Tomorrow, I plan to get started on the La Petite Mort games, though I may need to adjust my response format to account for the 4-hour time limit imposed on the games. (I’m unsure how best to offer feedback that’s useful or relevant for a game/piece where the author is not allowed to improve it anymore… I’ll mull that over I guess.)