Pharaohs’ Heir
Light puzzle game written in Ink. You’re being interrogated by the police over the destruction of a prized national artifact, and have to explain your day. A bunch of statues and Egyptian artifacts and symbols are involved in your adventures. Remember that scene in Indiana Jones where he goes underground and has to align a scepter to reflect the sun a certain way, to reveal a location on a small city model on the ground? Stuff that’s a bit like that. The story involves an ancient Egyptian ritual, and wait, how does it make sense for you to keep changing what you do earlier on in the day, with knowledge you glean later? Hmm!
This was solid fun for the most part. The game had an estimated playtime of half an hour, though I think I might’ve taken a bit more than that. You do have to do a lot of poking and prodding around to figure out what interactions are available and sometimes what new interactions have sprung up, which is partly why I took a bit longer.
This is basically split into three different locations/scenes which took place at different times of your day. Maybe because of the way Ink is built, there’s a circular flow to the proceedings where the game sometimes will push you forward out of a scene if you pick the wrong thing to do, and you have to go back in again and again. In a parser game, the implementation might be to let you stay in a place and let you move between locations as you wish, but the weakness of that approach is that you might spend a lot of time spinning your wheels in one location, when the thing you need to do is elsewhere, whereas here, it’s always fairly easy for you to exhaust all the options at a scene and know that you need to look elsewhere. One thing this has over how Twine might by default handle text is that you can always scroll back up to see all the text you’ve seen before, which ends up being very helpful. Taking notes would also help a lot because you do have to reference specific orders of things. It’s a lot of learning information in one place and then using it in another, and it isn’t always straightforward which scene to look at next.
There’s one part involving colored pots which was a bit laborious if you do a step wrong and have to start again, especially since there’s a specific trick that you have to pay attention to catch; I thought it was a fairly neat riddle involving aligning two different sets of information together, which just about cancels out how mildly annoying it was to have to redo the process twice over when I made mistakes. Washing and then coloring the pots felt like it didn’t need to be a two step process and could’ve been simplified. But that puzzle itself I thought was very neat.
Only step I really felt like I wasn’t guided towards at all was having to look at the sheets. I didn’t know to do that, and it took me a while to stumble across that action.
There’s just enough story and character personalities to hang the puzzles on; I didn’t particularly think too much about the whole back-and-forth-in-time part of the story, but I think it justifies itself fine just as something needed for the puzzle to work.
Had a nice time with this!