47 | THE TRISKELION AFFAIR
47 | THE TRISKELION AFFAIR
by: Clyde Falsoon
Progress:
- With some light assistance from the walkthrough (mainly to clarify linguistic disagreements I had with the game), I was able to complete this game in around 1h32m.
Things I Appreciated:
-
I found some of the environmental storytelling pretty interesting. I’ll point to a specific detail from a room that otherwise served little purpose. The acolytes’ room is described as, “This rectangular room is the acolytes’ sleeping quarters–barren and plain.” Now read this description of Balthazar’s bed: “An huge elegant four-poster. The posts rise to support a green canopy of fine silk. The blanket on top is gorgeous and the mattress is the thickest you’ve ever seen.” You aren’t told directly that Balthazar is benefiting immensely from the class structure of this church, able to live in a state of luxury due to his position of authority. But you can infer that from the environmental description. Similarly, I liked the attention to detail in describing the architecture of building (for instance, the game makes you learn what things like a “transept” and an “apse” are because they are relevant to the setting).
-
I really liked the interface element of having a list of “obvious exits” at the top of the screen. This helped me navigate faster as it reduces the tedium of re-searching descriptions to find the exit directions buried. This was great as a quality-of-life feature.
-
I liked the fact that there were roads leading to places you can’t (or shouldn’t) go. It made the world feel more lived-in, to help blunt some of the immersion-straining recognition that the game is a puzzle box for the player. It also offers opportunities for locations to develop more if there are going to be sequels/follow-ups in the same game world.
-
I don’t know where else to put this but I just thought it was very funny. These games keep asking me for my name, and I don’t want to put in my real name since I’m not usually on first-name terms with these games. But also, putting in “DemonApologist” is clunky and awkward as an in-game character name. So after repeated queries, I came up with (the admittedly a bit silly) “Apollo Diabolus” as a name that I’ve used in a few games now. It was comical when I, the very suspiciously named “Lieutenant Diabolus,” was assigned the task of helping recover an artifact from a chapel and was immediately given a holy amulet. Like weren’t they worried I might burst into flames upon entering the church? Maybe that’s what they were hoping for?
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
-
I thought there was a thematic disjuncture between Part 1 and Part 2 of the game. As a tutorial, Part 1 focuses the player on how hungry and tired they are while journeying toward their first destination, as well as managing your horse. This gave me the impression that I was going to need to be careful about tracking what my horse was doing and making sure that my character was well fed and rested. However, none of these issues come up in Part 2 whatsoever—once you arrive at the cemetery and dismount your horse, the passage of time/hunger/tiredness never come into play again. I’m not bothered by that, in the sense that, I can find that type of gameplay tedious. But I question the choice of making that the focus of Part 1, when it doesn’t really apply to Part 2?
-
As with many of the parser games I’ve played so far, this game and I had some significant linguistic disagreements. Some of these were relatively minor. For example: the first thing I did in the cottage was “search fireplace” as it stood out to me as the obvious location for something hidden. In my mind, “searching a fireplace” should have revealed more information, i.e., that there was a grate. Similarly, “search grate” and “look in grate” reveals no new information. In both these cases, I was required to “examine fireplace” and “examine grate.” In fact, I had this same problem again later, when I did everything to a door instead of directly “examine door” to be told it was covered in glyphs. The description even told me I was afraid to touch the door, even though I had long since touched the door without any effect. I kind of regret using the “help” feature, because the verb “search” had stuck out to me, and it inadvertently created this issue where I would “search” things instead of “examining” them.
-
Super minor issue: in the location “St Cuthbert’s Entrance Way,” “Up” is listed as an “obvious exit” but didn’t do anything. My guess is that this was meant as a way into the church, (as in, go up the stairs) that later got removed. So I would just remove the “up” from the exit list for clarity, or have “up” function the same as entering the building.
-
So beyond smaller stuff like that, I want to explore a bigger issue I had with some of the parsing. Here is an example transcript of an argument that I had with the game:
South Corridor
This corridor runs between the Transept and a double door to the south.
You can see double doors and two pews here.
Two heavy pews are wedged against the double door, one atop the other, holding it shut. Someone really did not want something coming this way through those doors!
What do you do? s
(first opening double doors)
The double doors are obstructed. You cannot go that way.What do you do? push pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? push top pew
Surely you’re joking, Apollo!What do you do? move pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? move upper pew
Seriously?!What do you do? move top pew
Where? I don’t see that here.What do you do? move HEAVY pew
Seriously?!What do you do? x pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? x THE PEWS IN THIS ROOM THAT EXIST
Where? I don’t see that here.What do you do? x barricade
The what?!What do you do? x door
The double doors are made of thick oak. They are closed.What do you do? open door
The double doors are obstructed. You cannot go that way.What do you do? x obstruction
Seriously?!What do you do? x two heavy pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? s
(first opening double doors)
The double doors are obstructed. You cannot go that way.What do you do? examine pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? look at pews
Which one? Be more specific.What do you do? look at top pews
Are you in the right place for that?
-
This argument reveals a few things (beyond the fact that I got a little sassy with the game). I believe a significant issue is the default messages that the player receives when not phrasing things right. Issue #1: The tone of the error messages is mean-spirited. That can be funny when you are doing something that obviously won’t work (like let’s be honest, I didn’t think “x THE PEWS IN THIS ROOM THAT EXIST” was going to help anything other than venting my irritation). However, when the game is mocking you for trying to interact with words in the description that the game gave you, it feels especially annoying. Like what do you mean, “Seriously?!” You’re the one who said it was an “obstruction”! Issue #2: There was a communication gap here over plural vs. non-plural words. The solution was to say “move pew” rather than “move pews.” If I’m meant to interact with a singular object, isn’t it more natural if it’s described as a singular object, rather than a set of objects? Issue #3: In the transcript above, the game told me that I needed to be more specific than “pews.” This directed me to attempt various ways of describing the pew that I wanted to move (top pew? upper pew? heavy pew?), none of which worked. But it turned out that the error message was misleading; “move pew” is the most general and nonspecific way to describe that action. Telling me to be more specific was the exact wrong cue, and I believe this error is the result of a default message that was unhelpful in this particular case. I point all this out to illustrate how small things that aren’t too bad when isolated, gradually build to create systemic problems if they happen to coincide like they did here. I can only imagine how annoying and time-consuming it must be to program parser games to do anything, so you have my sympathies for that at least.
-
I found that there was a clutter of too-similar objects in this game. I found many different candles, meaning that if I wanted to use one, I had to go out of my way to describe them. “Which do you mean, the tallow candle, half burned-down or a done candle?” This is a somewhat clunky, and I think avoidable, message to receive. Similarly, there is an issue like this with three lanterns in the same room, and multiple angel statues in the same location. While it is immersive in the sense that, in real life, there can been many similar copies of objects in the environment around you, I wondered what the point of being able to interact with so many different candles was. Why let me take the candlestick from the cottage, if you’re just going to hand me a candlestand in the door right before the dark area anyway? I’d guess the intention was to provide the player with many different ways to create a light source, but in practice, it just kind of cluttered the gameplay when I was stopped in my tracks to clarify which of several candle-related objects I was trying to use.
-
I thought more could be done to develop a sense of danger/horror in this game. The corpses outside are foreboding, but once inside the church, you are allowed to proceed completely unimpeded, except for one instance of a zombie attacking you that is completely contained within a single area. For the majority of the game, you can just calmly solve the puzzles without facing a threat. Even if you don’t want to add more combat encounters, why not add some more unsettling descriptions? Something I tried to do a lot in the game was “listen,” which didn’t yield much. I think creating an atmosphere of spooky sounds in the area (what do you hear in the walls, under the floor?) would create a stronger sense of the protagonist’s perspective of being on edge because of the setting, and therefore make it more immersive.
-
(This section of the response ended up being disproportionately long—I enjoyed exploring and playing this game much more than I had problems with it. So I’m just adding a reminder of that here. The length of this section hopefully conveys my earnest interest in thinking of ways that the experience could be enriched further, rather than malice toward the game.)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
-
Environmental storytelling. This is a game with a narrow scope—you essentially explore a church as the main activity—but the descriptions of the locations say a lot about the environment and what happened here, without the protagonist commenting on it. There’s an art to this type of writing, where you hope that the reader is paying enough attention to piece things together that you’ve laid out for them, but it also runs the risk of story elements floating past them without their notice. (I’m sure for the things I did notice, there were many other things that I didn’t see while focusing on solving the puzzles.) But it can be very rewarding for the reader to make these kinds of observations. So I think there’s a benefit of writing in such a way that the reader develops a stronger sense of the environment and how that reflects the characters/plot.
-
The challenges of including multiple copies of the same object in the same environment for a parser game. For the sake of realism, it makes sense to have multiple objects to interact with. For the sake of gameplay, it can create all kinds of issues, as documented above. When do you program in individual copies of the same object, vs. when do you treat them collectively as a single object? That seems to be a particularly vexing question here.
Quote:
- “The inside of the box is inlaid with plush black velvet. It is empty but you can see the deep impression of a mace that the box once held.” (I’m listing this as the quote because of the moment of suspense: finding the mace absent made me think someone might attack me with it later. That didn’t turn out to be the case, but I liked the idea of how seeing an empty box was enough to generate an emotional response.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
-
When I returned up the stairs with the mace, and the beautiful glowing orb had gone dark. The church was suddenly much more foreboding than it had been, and made me question whether this mission that the character was on might have some lingering negative effects. Arguably, I’ve left the church in a worse state than it started in.
DemonApologist_TriskelionAffair.txt (144.5 KB)