3 | LGG | A PUZZLED SOUL
3 | LGG | A PUZZLED SOUL
by: Sophos Ioun & RebelNightmare
Progress:
- I reached an end of the game in about 16 minutes.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- You are actively trying to escape an unstoppable creature. Every turn, no matter what you do, the creature will get closer to reaching you. The descriptions show how the creature is trying to get past the obstacles in its way, which put me in a tense mood as I struggled with the parser trying to get through the rooms. There’s also a kind of religious or spiritual horror to it—you are in limbo, and in order to escape, you commit worse and worse sins to get to the next room. While breaking the coral seems relatively innocuous, I quickly caught on that the way to get through each door is to do something evil—a few rooms I did not hesitate at all in poisoning a well because I was sure it would let me advance. I like the way that the game makes the player complicit in committing sins, rather than having the sins just be in the character’s past.
Things I Appreciated:
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After the first room (see later comment on that…), I really like how the rooms have multiple puzzles. This is a great way to deal with the time limit—I picked whatever puzzle I thought was easiest to work one and that made me feel like I had agency and wasn’t forced to fail over and over due to parser misery. The sin-based puzzles were also simple, but still interesting. I stole a coin from charity, robbed a dead guy, and poisoned a well in my desperation to proceed. These were evocative encounters.
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As mentioned above, I really liked the sense of threat from the pursuer—I had already learned many times over that the time limit was real from the first room, so I felt especially motivated to get past the next rooms once I finally escaped the first one. The constant reminders of the pursuer’s progress added to the tension.
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I liked the room descriptions—there isn’t a ton there because it’s focused on the puzzles, but it did a good job establishing the tone/atmosphere of the piece.
Miscellaneous Comments:
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The first room bottleneck was rough due to parser issues. (See the transcript for what went wrong.) I considered quitting this game about 7-8 minutes in when there appeared to be no logical way to exit the room. I tried many versions of hitting the wall with the hammer, none of which worked, and I kept running out of turns and having to start over. This sense of frustration built, until I finally found the combination that the game would accept. I think if you are going to bottleneck the player in the first room, and have a significant time limit, requiring a very specific phrasing of the command rather than allowing for some variation is not ideal.
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There was something confusing to me about the final room. The player is told there is a blue-eyed man here, and then also (?) there is a blue-eyed devil here who asks you “Will you sacrify this man?” I was confused by the word “sacrify,” which I interpreted to mean “sacrifice,” and then became further confused as to whether there were 2 blue-eyed people in the room or just the one. When I first read it, I thought that the devil was asking me if I was going to sacrifice the devil, because I interpreted “the blue-eyed man” as being the same NPC as the devil. So I was just… very confused as to what I was doing by answering yes or no here. Was I being asked by the devil if I was willing to sacrifice a second blue-eyed person in the room to advance myself further, or something else? The choice here felt less impactful because I didn’t fully grasp what I was doing beyond “yes” = bad and “no” = good.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This was a good example of the pros and cons of bottlenecking the player with a time limit. The upside: it added to the tone of the game to fail multiple times, making the sense of relief at breaking into the next room feel stronger. The downside: the many parser errors made me think that the game was broken somehow, and I considered quitting because it gave me the impression that the game was bugged in some way.
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This game had a plot twist that was not entirely unexpected, but still felt satisfying. It gave a new perspective on what the player has been doing to get the end, which I love. I felt involved with the twist because of my determination to do terrible things in order to get further in the game.
Memorable Moment:
- When I saw the toxic pool and the well and knew exactly what I needed to do to advance, and did it quickly and efficiently. Oh no! I’m a terrible person!
DemonApologist_PuzzledSoul.txt (17.1 KB)