49 | DUST
49 | DUST
by: IkeC
Progress:
- I completed the game with light use of the walkthrough/hints in about 1hr03m. For the most part, the hints I needed were instructions on how to phrase the thing that I was already trying to do, more than having no idea how to progress a given puzzle.
Things I Appreciated:
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I really enjoyed the mood/atmosphere of this piece. Your player character has a distinct sense of identity without being overdrawn, and the town feels desolate because of the environmental description and sparse population. There is a strong sense of consistency to this piece: even slightly weird elements, such as a fire-seeking parrot, were made to be cohesive to the environment through their implementation. I really enjoyed how this game delivered on the western setting in an appealing way. There’s occasional flavor text as well to add to the mood, such as coyotes that serve no game purpose that I could detect, but are still interacted with in a mild way.
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Most of the puzzles were well clued, such that I was able to intuitively understand what I needed or what I might use. For example, on the way back from using the crowbar, when you pass the windmill, it’s extra creaky and annoying to draw the player’s attention to it. But even if you ignore it, Bill will mention how annoying the windmill is a second time, at which point it clicked with me. There were other moments like this as well. When trying to feed the parrot, I went to Bill first hoping to buy crackers or something, and next I went to the saloon where I was helpfully told about a cookie that I left without eating earlier. I guess you could make the argument that these are the game showing its hand a little too much, but honestly, I appreciated that the game wants to cue you about which things to interact with next if you’re paying attention.
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This is such a minor thing that it pales in comparison with the many great things this game is doing, but the visual choice to have player commands be in red text helps them stand out well visually. It made scrolling back up for information less visually taxing because my commands were more easily distinguished from location descriptions, etc.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Overall, the puzzles and clues were pretty cleanly implemented. There was, however, one instance where a social puzzle completely misfired for me. In my first conversation with the barber, I first picked dialogue option “Any idea how to get into the mine.” This caused the option “May I borrow Molly for a little while?” to become visible. However, I had no idea who Molly was or why I would ask that. I selected that option though, and ended up with custody of the parrot. When I went to explore the hills, Molly found the crevice for me, which was a bizarre use of a parrot. Later, when I was working on a different puzzle, I eventually talked to the barber again and ended up learning why Molly could do that. I think this situation should be resolved by making it so that the option for borrowing Molly does not show up until the player has specifically seen the dialogue that talks about her. The other solution would be to force a general introduction through dialogue option 1 before allowing broader conversation to take place. After all, if you only want the player to look at the dialogue in the exact listed order, why make it nonlinear at all? In general, I thought a lot of the conversations only really made sense if asked in order, so I think just automatically having them happen in that order and saving the options for closer to the end would make them more natural.
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The scope of the game’s map and NPCs is very narrow, and there are pros and cons that come with that. On one hand, I found it comical that I was talking to the NPCs begging to borrow their stuff so many times, and I liked that those conversations often resulted in learning more information about their characters, giving them more texture. On the other hand, the amount of backtracking became a bit annoying. Consider this sequence of events: go to hill with Molly to find the crevice? Time to go back for the crowbar. Use crowbar on crevice? Time to go back to find a metal rod. Finally enter the cave? It’s too dark. Time to back and find a light source. Finally enter the cave with a light source? Time to go back and find a rope. There’s a realism to it, but it also feels tedious; it felt like I was being punished for trying to explore this cave at all, having each tiny step forward doled out several turns at a time. This made the progress feel less satisfying, because I never felt like I was given a truly new area to explore so many times in a row.
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The one puzzle I couldn’t progress without the walkthrough was the requirement to examine the sand on the gallows. I had solved the aspect of the puzzle where I knew that the rope was inside or under the platform, but no matter what part of the object that I examined, it seemed impossible to trigger recognition from the game so I could ask for the next tool. I guess that’s sort of the challenge of the puzzle: because you are surrounded by sand at all times, why would you ever choose to examine it? And even though it’s in the description, for me, it ended up being a logical step that I couldn’t connect for whatever reason. Maybe I would’ve gotten there eventually on my own, but looking at that transcript for that section, I seemed determined to examine any part of the gallows that was not sand.
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The writing is clean/excellent throughout, but there was one interesting turn of phrase that I wonder might be a German idiom since this is a translated work? “Marten stands behind the armchair popping his nose.” I wasn’t able to make sense of what “popping" his nose meant. (This isn’t necessarily a call to edit this, I personally enjoy encountering linguistic moments like this so long as it isn’t critical to solving a puzzle or whatever.)
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The main technique I picked up on here was the sly way the game draws your attention to important objects. At the beginning, the windmill seems like a vaguely suspicious but ultimately useless set piece, but it becomes just a little extra noisy right at the time when you might have a purpose for it. This opens up a lot of possibilities for how subtle changes in scenery that you’ve walked past several times can help direct player attention in the way the game wants. Note that this can also be used for red herrings: because the sheriff was asleep one of the times I arrived at his office, it made me think I was meant to sneak past him into his house to get something. This turned out to be impossible, but it was precipitated by the same kind of reading behavior that drew my attention to the windmill.
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Linearity of conversation: this game made me notice how dialogue is at its most compelling when conversations progress in a natural feeling order. If presented with a dialogue tree, often many of the permutations of what order they could be selected in is unnatural or clunky in some way. So, I learned that sometimes it’s better to constrain dialogue to a pre-written linear conversation on some topics, and in other situations, a more open-ended tree works better. For instance: meeting someone for the first time, the character introduction should take linear precedence over the more transactional demands the player has of that character.
Quote:
- “Several crooked crosses stand carelessly crammed next to each other on a small hill, none of them inscribed. Possibly the final resting place of deserters. Further ahead, four crosses stand neatly lined up next to each other, each at the head of a grave thoroughly edged with stones.” (This description really struck me for how it illustrated, in a small way, the politics of the town. The sadness of tidy, thoughtful graves of beloved family members, and the hastily thrown together, unmarked graves of the people who have been violently discarded as worthless. It is also an accidentally poignant comparison with a previous game I played at #36 above, The Deserter, about, well, a deserter… who is the main character rather than scenery.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- I mentioned this above already, but when I finally realized how I could use that suspiciously creaky windmill.
DemonApologist_Dust.txt (116.8 KB)