DemonApologist's IFComp 2024 Responses

Editor’s note: This one is the actual full response to The Curse now that the technical errors have been resolved.

14 | THE CURSE

14 | THE CURSE
By: Rob

Progress:

  • I died within the first 9 minutes of gameplay (yeah I know, I still suck at these), and a few more times along the way, but I managed to reach the end of the game in a total of 2hr01m (with a lot of help along the way).

What I Appreciated:

  • Because of how difficult this game was for me to set up, play, and understand, it was incredibly exhilarating to actually reach the end right when my 2-hour judging time limit was reached. Trying to find the exit from the pyramid was legitimately exciting because I knew I was this close to the end of the game and just had to figure out one or two more things. This is probably the most extreme emotion I’ve felt so far during this judging process, just like… the feeling of actually getting through this game that seemed to actively want me to not finish it with its enigmatic syntax and mysterious pop-up windows. I may not have what it takes to thrive in the 80s, but I survived this dose of them, and that’s enough for me.

  • There were many moments that I was legitimately surprised or amused by what happened, because of the writing. There are some really funny bits in there that give some spice to the experience.

  • Something I appreciate about this game is that despite its strange and somewhat unapproachable mechanics, as you play you start to develop a sense of the nightmare/dream logic that it operates on. There were times when I’d get clues to puzzles and think “Literally, what the hell does that mean,” but when I returned to it later I would have a sudden realization that made sense. An example of this was figuring out that I needed to pray at the altar, which didn’t click for me until I had thought about the inscription while wandering around elsewhere.

  • I really enjoyed the use of spooky sound effects and quickly disappearing pop-up windows. At first, I was annoyed that the images would appear for only a few seconds and vanish, but after a while I found that it added to the surreal experience. Any image that you needed to do something with wouldn’t disappear, so it was more a matter of contributing texture to the game experience.

Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:

  • The place I was legitimately stuck was when I was required to dig in the cave to find a flute. I had already touched the walls and encountered an event, so I didn’t think there was anything else to do. (At this point I broke my personal rule of not reading other reviews before I develop my own but I needed help beyond what was available and thankfully Mathbrush’s discussion and the response here gave me the clue I needed to advance. I had been stuck at the house with the drawings. I recognized Anubis and the backwards message, but when I typed “sibuna” [not into the mirror itself later, but I typed it as a regular command while standing in the house] as an attempt to advance in this room, I got this incredibly surreal response: “Ibuna…Ibuna !!! / IMPL WAVE / Lo specchio ha vibrato…” I figured out that this was Italian and that “specchio” was a mirror, but I hadn’t discovered an examinable mirror yet (I could touch the mirror and be told it was cold, but I couldn’t examine it. This was fixed when I had the flute.) There were a few other moments when I received Italian (such as: RUOTA& RIMANE A ZERO when inputting incorrect guesses at the sphinx) but it fortunately wasn’t enough to stop me from proceeding.

  • In general, this game relies on kind of challenging logic at points, which can be both good and bad. Without a 2-hour time limit where I was determined to finish, I would’ve been less inclined to take hints, but I wanted to try to get through the game so I could judge the full experience. It’s hard to say if I would’ve solved every puzzle on my own. Maybe not, but it’s the kind of thing where taking breaks and returning later probably would help. Often, the game expects you to intuit the existence of something that hasn’t specifically been named. For instance, when inside a pyramid, there are certain locations where you can and should “examine walls” even when walls haven’t been noticed and pointed out by your character. But, as a player, you should intuit logically that you are in a space that has walls, even if you character hasn’t brought them to your attention in any way. I think with playing more types of games like this, that logic would come more naturally to me.

What I learned about IF writing/game design:

  • The main thing I’ll take away from this experience is how fostering an antagonistic relationship between the player and the game itself can lead to interesting experiences. For example, there were times when I typed “help” and the game would just remove 1 point without giving any more information, and I would be annoyed enough that it renewed my determination to figure it out. The writing lesson here is that you can use the game’s responses and error/fail messages to set a tone for the experience. In this case, the game used this to force me to meet the game on the game’s own terms. It commanded me to work to make sense of its (affectionately) unhinged 80s jankiness. I wouldn’t want that every time, but in this context where you are being promised/threatened with exactly that, it does make sense.

  • Another game design lesson here is how to make “dream logic” accessible to the player. Even though I am a very inexperienced parser game player and took twice as long as the expected playtime even with using hints along the way, there were still several times that I was able to think like the game wanted me to think to solve puzzles. So I would look to a few of this game’s puzzles as a case study for how something surreal can be more intuitive than it appears at first glance.

Quote:

  • “I’m digging… Great!! Look what I found!! [comedic pause] Absolutely nothing.” (I was seething. But very amused.)

Lasting Memorable Moment:

  • The sound effect that plays when you master the art of dematerialization at the white sarcophagus.
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