42 | SIDEKICK
42 | SIDEKICK
by: Charles Moore
Progress:
- After 1hr34m of gameplay, with a current score of 5 out of 17, I received the vague and ominous message, “Suddenly, you have an uneasy feeling that you may have done something a while back to make the game unwinnable.” After typing “help,” the game informed me that this meant that (on standard mode, the default game mode) an action that I took an unknown/random number of turns ago caused me to now be drawing dead in this playthrough. My recommendation to others who haven’t played yet would be, if you think you are at a similar skill level as me (namely: a low skill level) for this type of game, to enable “easy” mode which I definitely should have done. This put me in a unique position so far in my responses. Normally, I play through as much as I can for the full two hours. Here, I technically have 26 minutes left on the clock to continue playing, but I don’t feel motivated to continue an indeterminably bricked playthrough, and I also don’t have enough time to restart the game entirely to try and get back to this point and figure out what went wrong. So, I decided to stop.
Things I Appreciated:
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What stands out the most about this game is its absurd humor. There are some very strange game mechanics and plot events, and this is well indicated by the front matter. I found myself dreading (affectionately) what asinine thing BS would do next, considering how actively unhelpful he is. The game is also extremely cavalier about human life, meaning you will just straight up kill your aggressors in absurd ways, which has the interesting effect of training you to behave antisocially in-universe for the sake of acquiring objects in case not having them will softlock you later. For example, at my worst, I was convinced that I needed to take Daisy’s collar and bell to do something, but I wasn’t able to directly remove them, so I tried to put a carrot on the nearby stump to see if I could get the swarm of ants to eat her and leave behind the collar for me to pick up.
. The game’s mix of dark and absurd moments made that seem like a plausible solution. In your desperation to survive this game, combined with its absurd tone, you are pushed toward creative ways of using the objects in the game together regardless of the ethical considerations of doing so. -
I really liked the implementation of the menu/clickable items and locations. It felt like a good compromise, giving parser-like gameplay without the possibility of entering unintelligible commands. Considering that there are times in the game where the number of turns is time-critical, I like how this design choice facilitates directing the player’s attention on what is actually possible rather than asking them to guess what verbs could be used with which objects.
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The “wacky western” setting and atmosphere was consistent and well developed. The town features exactly what you’d expect, and this is often played for laughs.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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In the first post of this thread, I discussed my experience with past IF text adventure games. This game felt very structurally similar to a game like Unnkulia, where you can unknowingly doom a playthrough based on timed events, or using up objects at the wrong time that are unrecoverable. In this playthrough, I found myself repeatedly in unwinnable situations where I had to undo a lot of turns to find a game state that I could continue from. I found the disjuncture between the tone of the game (silly/slapstick and mostly lighthearted) and the gameplay itself (brutally difficult and unwinnable if you don’t do exactly the required steps in every situation) odd. For instance, the first bad spot I stuck myself in was in the pantry with Bart. The game has Bart comically waste turns warming up to kill you, which gives the impression that you have plenty of time to figure out what to do. However, it turned out that it was impossible for me to do anything because I didn’t have the cheese or the clothespin. The game was giving me the message “this is a comedic forgiving game that gives you time to do stuff even when it’s unrealistic” with Bart’s behavior, and also giving the conflicting message “you are doomed because of the choice you made to explore this part of the map before picking up all the required objects from unrelated areas”. I had to retrain my perspective on gameplay to account for that, at which point, I was able to have more fun and solve some of the puzzles without the walkthrough, which felt more rewarding because of the game’s unforgiving structure. I guess to wrap up this comment, I’m not inherently against this level of difficulty, but I did find it more jarring in the face of the game design philosophy of most of the other games I’ve played for IF Comp 2024 where it seemed like there was an intent to minimize softlocks. This game feels like an old-school text adventure, with all the benefits and pitfalls that entails.
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Overall I thought the game mechanics were pretty clean, but there were a few situations where I encountered strange messages, so I thought I’d include those here. The first was when I was trying to tie Daisy to the sawmill wheel to see if I could get her to turn it. I tried a few different commands, one of which resulted in the bizarre message “Did you want to tie the length of rope to the sawmill or the sawmill?” The other time, also related to Daisy, was “With a ‘clang’ of her bell, Daisy enters from the down, her eyes on the large carrot.” I thought this was funny, but weird, that she “entered from the down” and I guess climbed the tree after me? Another issue I encountered is the disappearing toque. If you fail to examine Bart before killing him, the toque is not an interactable object on his body, which will softlock the game, as there is a required object hidden in it. In universe, though, there is no reason for the toque to have vanished as a result of his death. Thankfully, I saw the note about the toque in the hint guide so I was able to undo turns and redo that scene to get around that.
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I was puzzled by the implementation of an inventory carrying limit. I suspect there must be some later puzzles with heavy objects (my game ended with a cannonball as one of the items nearby) that make use of this inventory limit in some way. But the reason I found this strange was, you can hold an unrealistic amount of items in your hands, but not an infinite amount of items. If I can already be holding all that stuff, but not one additional item, that feels much less natural than either of the alternatives (a hand wave explanation for the infinite inventory, or a realistically-sized inventory that encourages more thoughtful selection of what to take where).
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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The main thing I learned is how different a game that can softlock feels from a game that doesn’t softlock. Ultimately, because of the “undo” button, the softlock isn’t truly a “lock,” but it feels much more demoralizing to play a game where you have to constantly undo actions, than to play a game where you try a bunch of useless incorrect actions without such a steep penalty. This game actively reshaped my player behavior. In other games, I had learned to be more selective about picking up only items that I thought were reasonably useful or had applications I was seeking out. This game forces the opposite behavior of taking any object that the game will allow you to take, no matter how irrelevant it appears in the moment. It really goes to show how deeply a design philosophy like “the player is allowed to fail to the spectacular extent that they might have to undo many turns” frames the play experience.
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The comedy of repetition. One of the funniest moments in the game (at the point that I got to) was when, after watching Buck get kidnapped from the saloon and rescuing him, he returns to the saloon and gets kidnapped in the exact same way for a second time. I laughed. Are you effing serious, Buck?! I feel like the comedy of the game is built on moments like this where the player’s familiarity with the characters/setting built over the course of playtime allows jokes like this to land.
Quote:
- “Well, Mr. Mayor, I eat danger for breakfast and evil for brunch. And that’s a kind of breakfast.” (Legendary himbo dialogue.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When it turned out I wasn’t able to ride the black horse because it was designated for main characters only. Thankfully I undid the turns where I fed the carrot to that horse trying to tame it, otherwise I would’ve had even more problems later. I never should have tried trading up from you, Molasses!
DemonApologist_Sidekick.txt (193.3 KB)