The Semantagician’s Assistant
This is a relatively challenging one-room puzzle parser game. It’s one of those games that is both relatively short and which can take a long time to solve if you can’t get on its wavelength; I found it both frustrating and rewarding at different points.
After a short intro sequence, you find yourself in a magician’s dressing room. You’re trying to interview to be their assistant. The magician isn’t here, though, there’s only a talking rabbit in the room, and a bunch of magic trick contraptions lying around (rings, a wheel, a table that can split in half!). You’re told by the rabbit that part of the interview is getting out of the room, but there’s no obvious door or exit. And then the game literally leaves you to (their) own devices after that.
The biggest thing is there’s a lot of puzzle contraptions, which is fun, and not a lot of feedback when you’re figuring out how they work, in some part because of the type of puzzle this uses. So either you’ve figured it out, or until you do, you’re stuck and the things you try will just give a general fail response. There’s a logic that it seems like you can generally work out (one exception, for me at least), but this is a puzzle game that I think prizes the mystery box element of its puzzles and does not want to give away its own tricks too easily. It wants you to master them all yourself. There’s an NPC (the talking rabbit) that you can ostensibly ask for hints, but outside of what they have to say about the seven or so main contraptions, I didn’t find them all that helpful in pointing me in the right direction for anything else. They tended to just state things that seemed fairly obvious to me, and you only get the one response for each thing. However, I’ll say this basically has two major puzzle objectives, each of which comprises several smaller steps, and the feeling of finally figuring out one of those smaller steps and then suddenly seeing all the rest of the steps I needed to take fall into place in my head and flying through them was fantastic, and slightly different from what even most other good puzzle parser games will provide.
Spoilery discussion of my experience with the puzzles since the game doesn't make it immediately obvious
it’s a bunch of wordplay puzzles where each device does something different, and you have to figure out what they do as well as what object you use with each. The first time I played this, I found three items, and couldn’t find a use for them as I tried them with every contraption. I had an idea that it might be wordplay-based because of the game title (I was also suspiciously eyeing the “won” object which, I mean, why else would you make that an item?) but couldn’t make even the first real step towards solving anything, so I moved on and played other comp entries; if I couldn’t even get past the first step then I didn’t feel like even looking at more explicit hints. On the last day of IFComp judging, I tried playing again, found one more item, and got a lot further. Made decent progress and was enjoying myself, finally started to get onto the wavelength of what the game was about. I found out how to use the wheel, which opened up a lot of potential combinations to think through, but I really couldn’t figure out what type of object I’d be looking for for opening the robe which was what I was trying to figure out, so I was stumped and finally looked at the walkthrough, which gave me a solution I felt went against the logical rules I thought were there. Which felt like an even bigger mini-betrayal than when it’s just a logical leap. Why, I thought, if it can affect just the part of one item in this case, why wouldn’t it affect parts of other items at other times?
So yeah, it took me a while to get really get started on the puzzles as I was initially unable to find the first step in solving the first real puzzle and I stopped playing, then I came back and started getting the hang of the puzzles, then I got stuck at a problem which fell outside of the logic rules I assumed were there in a game where there’s already a lot of possibilities to consider. So I looked up the next step on the walkthrough, which annoyed me enough that I gave up on it for a bit again. I returned to this after the comp, and after doing the unintuitive-to-me step from the walkthrough, I was able to pretty quickly finish the rest of the game.
My reflexive reaction when thinking about this is to think that this game could use a more gradual introduction of potential moving parts: less inventory items that don’t do anything at the start, and maybe you maybe don’t reveal all the contraptions at once and instead only discover the one you need next after you solve a preceding puzzle first? Less things to think about, and the player would have to prove they understood a mechanic by solving a small puzzle before presenting them with another contraption; no player is left behind. But I’m trying to think about what the pros of a more open approach like this are as well. I think it maybe WAS more rewarding to figure out what each contraption did in this setup? And the step-by-step approach might feel more artificial and hand-holdy by contrast? It did feel good to figure things out on my own, play with all the contraptions in a more toy-like and sandbox-y fashion.
More spoilery discussion
The most obvious comparison that comes to mind with the wordplay puzzles is Counterfeit Monkey, which gives you that step-a-step experience and teaches you things as you go along. Lots of constraints carefully removed at the right points, a very careful rationing out of options at every set of rooms, with story and world-building also carefully portioned out with the puzzles. You don’t need to think about bringing the player along as much if your game is mostly inventory-based parser puzzles; there’s a basic literacy you can assume of the player, I think? But it’s different with a more systemic and novel mechanic, and the nature of these sorts of puzzles is the player is always going to need to just sit and do a bit of thinking to figure out the right words, as there’s a limit to the amount of feedback the author can really give to commands. I also don’t remember Counterfeit Monkey giving me the moment quite like the one I mentioned before, about examining something (the dollhouse) and having a bunch of things click into place in my head as I could suddenly see the domino set of actions I needed to take to solve the bigger puzzle.
My overall feeling is outside of my general confusion on finding the first step in the dressing room and the logical hurdle I found later on, this worked well, but both those moments did make me stop playing for a bit. The intro also used a different puzzle than the rest of the game, which didn’t help. There’s a fun setup and puzzles involving a lot of inventive puzzle contraptions, even though the contraptions are mostly fun at the moment when you figure them out and remain inert until then. Outside of those tougher spots I encountered, I quite liked solving the puzzles, and it felt extremely rewarding at times as well.