5 | LGG | MUSEUM OF PARANORMAL PHENOMENA
5 | LGG | MUSEUM OF PARANORMAL PHENOMENA
by: Olaf Nowacki
Progress:
- I finished this game in about 37 minutes (note: includes time spent watching video clips from the film Ghostbusters and reading the Wikipedia page about the characters).
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This piece is a direct homage to the film Ghostbusters. I admit I have no nostalgia for the film and haven’t watched it in a very long time, so I wasn’t really the target audience for this game. (Truly, my reaction when the EctoComp theme was revealed to be Ghostbusters was, “Oh. Ok.” Sorry to any superfans
) My understanding is that Ghostbusters is kind of a comedy horror film that isn’t necessarily meant to be scary scary, more absurd than anything. I do think, however, that beyond the film trivia theming of the game, there is a secondary engagement with horror: the idea of navigating an uncanny museum that feels like it could come alive at any moment. I liked that aspect of the game and thought it could be emphasized even more!
Things I Appreciated:
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I really, really appreciated the note from “help” that the game is assuming that you are familiar with the film. Once I saw that note after making no progress, I was able to find a strategy to go forward. The puzzle I was most focused on was trapping Slimer using the “ghost trap,” so I tried things like putting the trap on the food or putting food in the trap to see if that worked. Once I watched the film clip and saw the cigarette, a few minutes later the structure of the game clicked immediately: I wasn’t supposed to actually be doing the actions from the film, I was supposed to be fixing the museum so that each scene correctly reflects what is happening. Once this was established, it wasn’t too hard for me to go through and assign the objects to the different people. So my point here is: thank you for a “help” option that was actually essential and helpful while not spoiling the puzzles.
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I enjoyed the descriptions of the artificial museum elements, it was good at creating the uncanny quality I described above. I wasn’t sure what type of game I was in, so I felt at any moment that actual supernatural things might happen in this museum, which was a point of interesting tension here.
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I thought Slimer was great as a decoy puzzle element. I was convinced that I needed to do something with them, since they moved around to different rooms and had a dynamic presence as a result. And, interestingly, Slimer did help me figure out the game’s structure: I kept trying to give objects to Slimer, and got a custom error message, which made me realize later that I should be giving things to the mannequins.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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The biggest hurdle I had was needing out-of-game knowledge to solve puzzles without just trying every combination. But, the game successfully directed me to look up Ghostbusters clips so that I could solve it, so I don’t think this is such a bad thing. I think my recommendation would be to say up front (without even requiring the help command) that the game assumes some knowledge of the film to proceed.
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Very minor, but the fridge being “five point nine feet high” could be changed to “five feet nine inches high” to sound less like a conversion from metric. This is a bit esoteric, but since a foot is a unit of measurement that (absurdly) isn’t naturally divisible by 10, seeing it written that way was slightly weird to me. Where, by comparison, if I were told that a fridge was 1.9 meters high, I would accept that without question.
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Also minor, but I thought “x self” could have had a more specific message rather than a default one. I feel like this would be a good opportunity to add to the characterization of the main character as a Ghostbusters superfan to see that they were wearing thematically appropriate clothing or something!
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I thought this was an interesting case study in audience and outside knowledge, and how to communicate that to the player. Here, it would have been somewhat fruitless for me to continue wandering around trying to manipulate and combine objects to solve puzzles, but the help message did a great job in pointing me toward the correct approach.
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Something else I noticed is the clue system: I realized close to the end that rooms that had been fully solved gave the message “Everything looks good here,” which guided me back to the fridge as the only misplaced object remaining. Since I had never found the seventh object (the help note also mentions the total number of objects) I had to conclude that the fridge itself was the final object even though I couldn’t pick it up. Thus, the game gently nudged me toward the solution here.
Memorable Moment:
- The moment that I finally realized how to interact with the fridge.
DemonApologist_MoPP.txt (27.7 KB)