44 | AN ACCOUNT OF YOUR VISIT TO THE ENCHANTED HOUSE & WHAT YOU FOUND THERE
44 | AN ACCOUNT OF YOUR VISIT TO THE ENCHANTED HOUSE & WHAT YOU FOUND THERE
by: Mandy Benanav
Progress:
- I reached the end of this narrative/game in about 52 minutes.
Things I Appreciated:
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The descriptions and writing style are quirky and inviting. This is an undeniably cozy game, where nothing really threatens you, especially if you behave empathetically toward it. It feels like a very wholesome experience to play this game, despite (or, more likely, because of) the weird stuff in it. It’s quite charming.
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Many of the game’s puzzles are social in nature. This game successfully fosters an illusion of a living, dynamic environment because of this aspect. It’s not just a matter of finding a random key somewhere to put in a random door elsewhere. You need to learn who has the key, and by getting to know them, understand what their needs are such that they’d be willing to give it to you. Many of the puzzles are like this, where figuring out what to talk to someone about, or how to approach an entity, will allow you to develop a rapport with them. It fosters a player that is caring, but not naïve. Kindness alone is not going to get a cat to part with a dead mouse, after all.
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The rooms dynamically shift based on what you’ve searched and who you’ve talked to, and since there aren’t a huge number of rooms, if you’re stuck, a quick circuit of the house is usually enough to un-stick yourself. While I’ll discuss a limitation of this approach later, on the whole, the fact that the game de-clutters the description of stuff that you’ve already searched reduces effort wasted, which seems appropriate for the overall atmosphere/vibe of the game.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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This game isn’t meant to be too difficult. Thematically, in-universe, the “puzzles” are more about building a social rapport with the residents of the house to test whether you are a reasonable person to entrust their care to. So I don’t mind that the puzzles were not that intensive. Even so, I felt like puzzles sometimes auto-solved before I had a chance to contemplate where I’d look next. The rooms have an anti-frustration feature where if you’ve searched different areas, you will not be able to search them again if there’s nothing there. As a result, though, I found that because I would search everything I could the first time I entered a room, when I would get a new puzzle/fetch prompt, I would be immediately told where it was (the room description would say something to the effect of, “you remember seeing something like that in the [x location],” and that would be the only searchable location). I would almost prefer, I think, to be tested on my absorption of the descriptions I had been reading, and to be allowed to re-check them. Perhaps it still would not be that satisfying to just re-click every location, but I think it would’ve been nice to have been given the opportunity to recall where to look for something, as opposed to having it be preemptively solved.
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While I thought the visual presentation of the library bookshelf was creative, I found it tedious to click on the random-looking symbols trying to make sense of what it was. I found this particular interface cumbersome. It’s not necessary for the player to click on each and every possible book, as the books that you might need can be deduced from interactions with the characters, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to click on everything out of fear that any random book could have critical information for a puzzle. At one point when I was sort of stuck, I started to worry that I was missing a book to click on and went back to click them again—this turned out not to be necessary, but I didn’t know that at the time. Perhaps this is another example where a challenging interface like this is meant to function as a clue to the player to go do something else. But even knowing this, the library still felt like it might hold solutions for my problems!
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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I really enjoyed the implementation of the dialogue and social puzzles. My favorite overall puzzle in the game involved acting as a diplomat, talking to Basil and the Furniture about each other in order to reach an accord between them. Because there are many possible subjects you could talk to each character about, it’s unlikely that you would accidentally solve a social puzzle like this—rather, you’d recognize the need to repeat the same actions until resolution by listening to what they were telling you. So I think this is a good example of delivering a puzzle through dynamic dialogue where the game “remembers” who you’ve talked with about what subjects.
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This was a great example of puzzles that are weird enough to be interesting, but not so weird that the solutions are unintuitive nonsense. For instance, feeding a living, chittering snarl of neckties (I think that’s what it was? Sorry about my memory, it’s late and it’s hard to re-check the text in a Twine game like this without fully replaying it) to a bird is objectively weird, but when you see it in game, you know exactly what it’s for because the game has primed you for this “weird” solution seamlessly.
Quote:
- “Lucifer and all his hosts with their hot pokers could not oblige me to speak to those cretins, so you’ll jolly well have to do it for me!” (The “cretins” in question? An aggrieved collection of talking furniture…)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- Probably the funniest moment of the game is realizing that The Joy of Cooking will almost certainly contain the recipe for the ghoulish “mouse mousse” that you are looking for. It’s an amusing joke for anyone familiar with that cookbook, which has some truly cursed recipes. Seared into my memory is a section of the real Joy of Cooking that describes how best to take care of sea turtles or snapping turtles to prepare them to be made into soup. I felt like this joke was in here just for me to recall that childhood memory of finding that recipe in the cookbook. (Reading these responses is quite the minefield. Who knows what the hell kind of weird thing is going to be lurking in my ramblings? Sorry that, for you, in this moment, it was about the Joy of Cooking sea turtle soup. In my defense, I didn’t know I’d be talking about this today, either.
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