If you want to try your hand at making a parser game, I’d really recommend just making a start and seeing how it goes. I found it daunting from the outside myself, but was amazed how easy it was to simply write “The X is a room. The Y is a container in the room. The Z is an object in the Y” and end up with a completely playable result. Obviously you’d want to describe all those things, and probably have connections to other rooms with other objects, but the basics are trivial to grasp. Those snippets that seem so incomprehensible will almost inevitably be things that other people, possibly people who are much more confident with Inform were themselves struggling with. You probably won’t run into that kind of difficulty unless you’re already feeling ambitious.
I know you said elsewhere you were tempted to move away from Harlowe, but Harlowe offers some very easy methods of styling your story without touching CSS if you don’t want to. Simply make a passage with the special tag “header” and then put macros in there that style all the text, or the entire page background. The toolbar in the editor makes this quite straightforward even if you don’t know what to type. It’s pretty powerful too! (This may well be possible with story formats other than Harlowe, by the way - I’m just not familiar with them myself.)
Ironically, the Mac version of the game still didn’t work (I’m guessing it’s because Apple “generously” ended support for 32-bit applications quite a while ago, but perhaps the game would run on Mojave or earlier). I ended up setting up a virtual machine to run the Windows version of the game, which did work! I played for the full two hours with moderate use of the walkthrough (more discussion of that later), and I made it as far as a new area where I was trying to find fruit to give to someone before timing out and stopping. Unfortunately, I was not able to create a log for my playthrough—while trying to figure out how to do this (I needed to set up an email program within the virtual machine Windows environment), I restarted the program and it had wiped my progress, and thus, the log. I am sorry about this, because I think the transcript would’ve been helpful not only for me in writing this response, but in terms of fine tuning some of the puzzles for the author.
Things I Appreciated:
I thought the protagonist character was interesting. You play as a magic student who was extremely bad at magic and has developed a disdain for it, and have decided to return to the rogue lifestyle of stealing stuff. In a way, this is a mirror version of Forbidden Lore. In that game, you explored a magical study as someone deeply invested in learning about the dark arts. Here, you explore a magical study as someone who doesn’t care at all, to humorous effect. I particularly liked that the protagonist was a bit rude and annoyed by the NPCs in the game in a way that made sense for their character. Such as, for instance, exiting a conversation with, “Why don’t you ruin your own day? Bye.” I found that amusing, and also kind of appropriate to the situation.
A major game mechanic I really enjoyed was speaking with various taxidermied NPCs using the claw. Each entity that you talk to has something interesting to say, and has thoughts about being taxidermied and how they feel about their marginal existence of being brought back to life and dying over and over again. I think because of the bright green color of the gem, using it to repeatedly bring cantankerous NPCs back to life reminded me a lot of the LucasArts game The Dig (1995), which was a fun thing to reminisce about. Once I understood how the claw worked, I was excited to finally have something to do with all the random stuffed/inanimate creatures throughout the lair that I couldn’t otherwise interact much with.
I liked that even in the text-entry/parser mode, the objects you could interact with were still highlighted. It helped me focus my attention, and there were times where I decided to click on them to help figure out how to phrase the thing I wanted to do (or when that failed, I went to the walkthrough to see what it wanted from me). In the majority of cases, I was able to work out on my own what to do, but I liked having the stages of intervention (clicking the objects, and then the walkthrough) to assist me. There were only a few times when I looked at the walkthrough to decide what to do, as opposed to how to do it.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
There was one puzzle that I needed the walkthrough to solve, and don’t think I would have been able to solve on my own even given more time. This takes place in the laundry room: one must take dirty laundry out of the washing machine and put it into a laundry basket, then take a bag of spores from the freezer, and specifically pour the spores onto the laundry, which causes it to grow into a giant sponge. I would call this “moon logic,” except that in this game, the moon itself is involved in a much more logical puzzle than this. I think the issue I have with it is something linguistic, or perhaps to do with the cluing of it. If the clothes specifically had a mildew or moldy smell, that would’ve helped. Similarly, if the object I was trying to produce was a mushroom or toadstool, that also would’ve helped. With “sponge,” my mental image goes first to a kitchen sponge, and second to a sea sponge, neither of which have anything to do with mold or fungus. Similarly, the requirement to “tip” the bag made it harder for me to organically reach the solution, as that isn’t a verb that was used up until that point.
There was a significant red herring that tripped me up involving the duck (so, this is not necessarily a criticism: I think red herrings can be fine, I’m just describing it). For the other console discs, the numerical clues are evident (the numbers 9 and 7 are prominently displayed when examining those items). For the duck, I interpreted the clue “Rubber duckie, you’re the one” as meaning that the number 1 is the input for this console. This didn’t work. Later, when I read the code 2-9-1 in the “embarrassing book,” I thought, ok. I know there’s a 9 (woman) and 1 (duck), so the field must be a 2. When I had examined the painting of the field, I had seen a 7, but I thought that was a clever twist that I had mixed up the numbers (since 7 and 2 are visually similar, it’s plausible to me that the protagonist would have done that). I then wasted a lot of time with bad codes using the 2 and 1. The walkthrough provided the solution: I had to think to put the duck in an otherwise unrelated fogged glass box to reveal that it contained a 6. Wouldn’t my original plan that I had tried at the beginning (cutting open the duck with the scalpel to retrieve the number inside) have been a lot more logical than thinking to put it in a box? All in all, I enjoyed the diversions this puzzle took me on, but I wonder how much of this was intentional and how much was a nasty coincidence based on how I put information together.
There was one puzzle that I thought had an actual error. When you receive slag as an item to use, the walkthrough instructs you to put this in a mortar. Yet, in none of my time examining this room, was a mortar and pestle ever listed as an interactable item. There isn’t one on the description of the table among the other items. It could be that I needed to investigate a certain element of the room that I never found to reveal that a mortar was present, but I wasn’t able to figure it out. While it’s not completely unbelievable to intuit that a mortar and pestle could be in this lab, I think having that object included in the table description is essential to make this solvable without the walkthrough.
There are a few puzzles that require you instead of “examining” something, you need to specifically “examine into” those things. I found this to be a somewhat unnatural command, as if I’m examining something, as a player I would typically assume that this covers the basic ways that you can look at something already.
Early on, I tried to put the live snake in the kitchen with the mouse, but this didn’t cause any interaction between them. I feel like this is a good place to give the player some kind of message that they’re on the right track: for instance, the snake approaches the mouse, who instantly darts into the hole. The snake is stopped from approaching the hole by the cabinet that hasn’t been moved yet. So as a player, you can learn that the snake and mouse interaction is important, but there’s more to do. Instead, as a player, when putting the live snake in the vicinity of the mouse did nothing, it made me think instead that these game elements were not connected in any way, despite my initial instinct that they went together.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
The dangers of handing the player a scalpel. Who knows who might get stabbed? No, that’s not why. At least… not this time. Rather, I think the challenge of an object like this is that it’s too useful because of its sharpness. There are objects that seem cuttable. So as a player I was annoyed when I couldn’t use it in the way that I wanted to. So, I want to say something positive about the design of the scalpel, and something I think could be improved. The positive: when you use the scalpel at the place it’s required, it breaks. This is good, because it signals to the player that it’s not required for anything else. The thing to improve: because this is an item likely to be tried, a lot more custom error messages were needed. For instance, I felt very confident that a scalpel could cut through the soft rubber of the duck. Even a silly error message like, “You press the scalpel against the soft yellow rubber, but can’t bring yourself to harm something so cute. You curse your newfound emotional attachment to this inanimate object.” would at least give me a reason as to why I couldn’t—or in this case, wouldn’t—cut it. Similarly for the bag of spores, something to indicate why it wouldn’t work to cut the bag to get the spores onto the laundry would’ve helped direct my attention better, e.g., “The bag can already be opened, you doubt cutting a second hole in it will accomplish anything.” I’d bet there are even more things that other players might have wanted or tried to cut. So to round out this comment, the last question I have is: is the game better off having a single-use scalpel that breaks, creating confusion with other puzzles, or is it better off having some other way to retrieve teak without introducing a scalpel at all? That’s an interesting question to me, I’m not sure how I would answer it. What I’ve learned is that the more useful an object seems, the more bespoke error messages will need to be written and added to help guide the player away from other uses of that object that seem plausible.
I appreciate this game’s invitation to write odd NPCs in odd situations. With just a few lines of dialogue, this game gives a plausible characterization to a taxidermied fish that has been brought back to life. I like the care that was put into thinking about how such an entity would talk about its experiences. The use of NPCs in general made the environment feel a lot more lively and dynamic that it would’ve been otherwise as just a map to explore and solve. It makes me think that there are a lot of strategies to include NPCs without committing to writing an entire person with full agency into an environment and the pitfalls that can invite. (Now that I think about it, the unusual and interesting NPCs also remind me of a similar effect in An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There, as well the previously mentioned Forbidden Lore.)
Quote:
“The cheese is really hard and completely inedible! Brilliant, I’ve wanted that for a long time!”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
The most exciting moment for me was when there was the twist reveal that the master’s lair was actually a space station. All the clues were there, but I didn’t really piece it together. As a result, I was still surprised and delighted by that reveal. That definitely gave me a big sense of wonder and excitement, where I felt like I had made real progress in understanding the world I was in.
Ouch, you’ve already played through “The Master’s Lair” after all. I was just about to talk you into the Mac version.
I really had a lot of tech issues with it, mostly related to the fact that it’s not that easy to provide a release-ready version of an app on the Mac. Or maybe I’m just too stupid. In any case, the command line tools on the Mac almost drove me crazy.
(32-bit support was not the problem)
Anyway, a Mac version is now available. I’m not quite sure yet whether it runs on all Macs. But it can be played cleanly.
In any case, thank you very much for your detailed review! I’m glad you appreciated my funny critters.
Ah, I’m sorry for jumping ahead of you and playing it out of turn.
In fairness, it was because I was excited to finally play it. So, not the worst reason!
At least the next time The .Exe Question™ comes up—for future comp or game reviews I might theoretically do—I now have two different strategies to try playing them (Wine + virtual machine).
Let me add my public congrats to your table run here, a great, high quality, thoughtful engagement. Thanks so much for finding this space and adding your voice! I am particularly smitten with your “What I have Learned” sections. I feel you are digesting things in a careful and deliberate way, and kinda highlighting what some of us might be missing by NOT doing so!
