The Wise-Woman’s Dog
So this is quite a polished puzzle parser game. Not surprised it placed high!
You’re a magical shaman’s dog. Your owner is bedridden with some sort of powerful curse, and you want to cure them. Dog player-characters are surprisingly not that uncommon in parser IF as I can think of a few (normally smell plays a bigger deal, and maybe you can only carry things around in your mouth) but here your owner has also given you a few gifts: you’re smarter than the average dog, and you can also carry spells around. To be specific, one spell at a time. That’s the basis for most of the puzzles: figuring out how to carry and use the spells you come across during your travels, as you travel from your small village to a nearby city in a quest to find a cure.
There’s a lot of really neat thoughtful quality of play accommodations. An ASCII map will show all the places you’ve been to and also points of interest, including puzzles you haven’t figured out yet. You can also bring up a list of spells. You can ALSO bring up a list of places you’ve seen where there’s still a puzzle to solve. And you can also FETCH spells at any time, and if it’s possible to do so, you’ll just automatically go and grab the spell you want and then travel back to your location (It’s a bit similar to what Hadean Lands did, how it auto-performs tasks if it’s possible to do so). This all means that I felt encouraged to keep exploring, always with the ability to look up what other places to go back and poke around in, to never feel directionless or like I was forgetting anything, and to not have to juggle too much information at once. Which is all magnificent, it’s very well implemented, and leads to a really pleasant experience.
There’s a bunch of world-building here; some of it might not be relevant to a dog just passing through, trying to cure its owner (like here’s a long soldier’s conversation that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what you’re doing), but it leads to a feeling of a fully formed world since everything seems to have been thought through. Lots of the world building comes into play in some of the puzzles.
Hiding some text here so post isn't as long
It’s a great game, polished! It’s split into three chapters: a short intro in the shaman’s house, one in the shaman’s village, and then one once you reach a nearby city. I did enjoy the village section tremendously, and slightly cooled on the parts in the city. It felt really great helping out all the villagers and their troubles, and it felt like I was learning more about the village as I got to know each of their problems and also their whole taxation system. The city by contrast felt like a place of strangers–which yeah, it should–but outside of a person you see on the dock when you first get there, there aren’t obvious problems to solve like in the village, so I wandered around until I realized that everything revolved around two vendors: you’re solving puzzles to get objects to sell to one vendor, so you have enough money to buy these two magical items from another vendor, the more expensive of which they say will cure your owner. And soon the corrupting influences of the big city have settled in and I’m bartering, stealing, trespassing, and breaking things in an effort to scrounge up the needed coin.
These two vendors felt like slightly unnatural fixtures compared to the fictional world of the village. They felt almost like RPG NPCs (bring me 10 silver, drop off your quest items at this location) displaced into a different sort of game. It’s also the realization that within this whole city across this fairly large map, it turns out that the only way to ever get any silver is from this one vendor standing in the corner. If the game had started from the city and the vendors had been presented upfront about their function to the player, I probably would’ve happily played along and solved the great city puzzles without a second thought–I play RPG videogames without questioning the quest-givers there, and I’m not thinking too hard about if everything makes narrative sense when I play Arthur DiBianca’s fun IF puzzle gauntlets. But even though the village is based around a similiar subgoal of solving puzzles to unlock the boat to the city, there’s an entire taxation event bit of lore to explain why the boat is waiting, and each puzzle is tied to a villager that has a story behind them. It felt like I was being presented with a different level of conceit for the puzzles in the city, and I did have to adjust.
My focus in the city ends up a lot more on objects (how to get them, their transactional value) and less so on people (learning about them, helping them out). I felt the tone shifting to something colder, and I didn’t connect that tone to any grander point made by the story. I wanted to go back to the warmth of the village, but I still needed to carry on with my mission. Which does sound like an interesting bit of empathy storytelling coming into play, but it doesn’t erase the distance I still felt.
None of this, by the way, was a huge impediment to my enjoyment of the game. But it’s just one of those small things about my experience that makes me want to write through why I felt a certain way, and it’s hopefully interesting.
Puzzles are fair, some are quite inspired, and the whole spell system was fun throughout. The thing you can buy in the mid-game was a great moment, once I realized the possibilities it opened up. I solved enough puzzles to end the game but there were still a couple left, which the walkthrough seems to say are supposed to be optional challenges. Looked up hints for two things: how to get the wind spell out of the house, and how to get past the tapestries. The latter did make me feel bad, because I ended the game with a cured owner but there’s also a temple about to burn down, which I did not figure out how to warn anyone about; Sorry, people in the temple. The other thing about the city was, there were a bunch of items you could sell but which seemed very ominous if you did so, I quickly did an UNDO for the first one of those I sold, and really avoided selling any of those items until I reached a point where I couldn’t figure out anything else I could do to finish the game, and a peek at the hints didn’t seem to reveal any huge swath of more benign things I’d missed.
A really polished and strong puzzle parser game with a neat magic system, interesting characters, an interesting world and really well implemented and helpful quality of play additions.