Adventure in the Crypt
I had no success launching this on Linux, but there is an online play option, so I’m going to be using that one. Heads up to authors out there: if your game can be played as a web page, please also let people download that web page! I tend to download IF to play on the road without internet access.
My first impression is that this is the sort of color scheme I would have used in high school:
Before I discovered my colorblindness, I liked to make my website’s text be magenta on goldenrod vel sim. I was frequently told that it looked horrible to everyone else, but I liked it! And in this case, I can easily see the difference between every color here. So if people with normal color vision don’t find it garish, I say it’s a good palette. (Though every word being a different color might get grating. We’ll see.)
This is another custom system, so it comes with my caveats about custom systems: it’s really hard to make a new system that can compete with all the quality-of-life features and user-friendliness that modern systems offer. It’s definitely impressive to build a new system! But players aren’t going to say “this is very good by the standards of a new system”, they’re going to say “this is not good by the standards of existing systems”.
In Adventure in the Crypt you start at a desert campground beside the newly uncovered entrance to a long‑lost crypt, its doorway revealed after a haboob tore through the region. Ramen the Shaman is here with you, steady and unhurried, ready to walk you through the first steps before you descend. The crypt shifts. The dark listens. Somewhere inside a gold feline idol waits to be discovered.
You’ll need to solve the puzzles to pass through the relief chamber, the circular chamber, the chamber of mirrors, the hall of echoes, the idol chamber, and the crypt exit.
You’ll have a trusty guide, Ramen the Shaman, a sherpa who you can talk with to learn helpful information about the crypt.
My first impression of the game itself is not great. We get a loredump from Ramen the Shaman, but every paragraph of the exposition requires us to hit ENTER afterward, and then redisplays the room description and items before printing the next paragraph. The end of that exposition suggests TUTORIAL ON, and using that command…brings up another flood of exposition, ENTER after each paragraph, room description reprinted every time. More on that below. I’m also unclear on whether we’re in the real world (Egypt?) or a fantasy world with shamans.
The “redisplay the room after every input” pattern continues throughout the game. This isn’t uncommon in old text adventures (I keep citing Scott Adams), but those typically put the room description in a separate panel. Here, the room description comes after the effects of our action, so I need to scroll up to see what actually happened. This makes basic tasks like “examine every object in the room” more tedious than they have to be.
The grammar of the game is also shaky. When you come across a locker (for example), its name is not “locker” but “a locker”, so “the a locker is unlocked”; inside it is “a desert cloak”, so “A a desert cloak can be removed…”. The same is true (as far as I can tell) for just about every object and room: they always have “a” or “an” in front of them, regardless of grammar. It doesn’t make anything unreadable, but it’s jarring. (“You light a sturdy torch using a small firepit.”)
And to round off my points of friction, the handling of invalid commands is not great. In most cases, if a command doesn’t work, it simply says “You can’t [player’s input]”, with no sign of what’s wrong. Is the noun wrong? The verb? The grammar? No way to tell. TAKE STURDY to take a sturdy torch is rejected the same way as TAKE ALL, TKE TORCH, and TAKE ZQBLM…and the same way as UNLOCK DOOR (you need a WITH KEY), and UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY (if the key is on the ground instead of your inventory), and so on.
If you EXAMINE with an invalid noun, on the other hand, it displays a tree diagram of the object hierarchy in the current room. This means EXAMINE can be used to figure out which nouns are implemented, if you remember that the tree diagram means “not implemented”. But this is not a great way to figure out whether the verb or noun is wrong—it would be much better if the game told you outright!
A Torch Rack
├─ A Sturdy Torch - extinguished
└─ An Old Torch - extinguished
A Sherpa
A Small Firepit - on fire
For a specific example:
The Relief Chamber
A vaulted stone hall, the air is cool and still. There are four carved reliefs. To the West is a serpent, South is an eagle, East is a jaguar, North is a monkey.
A serpent relief is raised up.
An eagle relief is raised up.
A jaguar relief is raised up.
A monkey relief is raised up.
You notice a sherpa.
The Crypt Entrance is open
The Circular Chamber is locked
You can go
U The Campground
Now what? lower serpent
You can’t lower serpent.
[snip]
Now what? push serpent
You can’t push serpent.
[snip]
Now what? x serpent
Score 0 / 7
The Relief Chamber
Objects here
A Serpent Relief - up
An Eagle Relief - up
A Jaguar Relief - up
A Monkey Relief - up
A Sherpa
Now what? x relief
Please choose a relief
[ 1 ] A Serpent Relief
[ 2 ] An Eagle Relief
[ 3 ] A Jaguar Relief
[ 4 ] A Monkey Relief
x which relief ?
Ah, so it can’t be referred to as a SERPENT. I have to refer to it as a RELIEF, then use disambiguation to select the serpent. Now to try LOWER, PUSH, etc on RELIEF…the puzzle isn’t hard (the game basically tells you what to do: the previous line says the key is “starting with West and going counter-clockwise”), but actually executing that solution is a chore. After that, instead of unlocking the door directly, the game gives you a key, which you need to put into the door (in the same location).
I tried to unlock the door with the key, but…
Now what? unlock circular with key
Please choose a key
[ 1 ] A Serpent Key
[ 2 ] A Brass Key
unlock which key ? 1
A serpent key is not storage. You can’t unlock circular with key.
[snip]
The Crypt Entrance is open
The Circular Chamber is locked
Now what? x chamber
You can’t x through the chamber.
I’m not sure what it means when even X fails. It seems like you can’t examine doors? Eventually I was able to take the key (that was the real problem), unlock the door with the key, open the door, and go north…but none of this was really puzzling, or especially fun. It just felt like busywork. The next puzzle had exactly the same solution as the first one (start west, go counterclockwise), which meant I spent a lot more time on the not-fun stuff (searching for the right commands) than the fun stuff (solving the puzzle itself).
So that’s where I stopped for now. Building a custom system is undoubtably impressive! But I’m just not really having fun with the game in its current form. I think the system needs more polishing to reduce the friction points (better error messages for invalid actions and keeping the room description from drowning out the action response would help a lot!), and the game needs more polishing to enhance the fun parts (signpost the solutions to the puzzles a bit less obviously). But there are the bones of something good here, and I hope it gets the polishing it needs to really shine!
Tutorial
As mentioned above, I wasn’t a fan of how the tutorial was presented. Giving all the information in one huge non-interactive blob, in my experience, can mean the player zones out and glosses over the details. Breaking up that blob with “press ENTER to continue” doesn’t help; it just makes it take longer. And reprinting the room description before every paragraph just makes it harder to keep track of your place.
The paragraphs themselves come off as rather overwrought:
The world can be as rich as the author likes. Moving around the world is a simple matter. The bottom of the description will list the possible places you can travel from this location. They will have a cardinal direction and be followed by a brief description of the location. To change locations you can put in the cardinal location and press enter. Other ways to move around would be to put in the name of the location and press enter.
If this were my game, I would shorten this down:
You can move around the world using compass directions. Viable directions are listed under the location description.
You’re moved to the “Tutorial Tent” for the tutorial, where after the exposition you’re shown a sample puzzle and walked through it step by step. This does avoid giving away any solutions to the game’s actual puzzles, but it also makes the tutorial feel disconnected from everything else. (You do keep the items from it afterward, though?)
This definitely sounds like damning with faint praise, but I found the tutorial…adequate. It showed me how the system worked, but it didn’t fill me with excitement for what was coming next. It felt like the game was going through the motions, providing a tutorial because the comp required a tutorial, rather than because it actually fit into the game. The lack of enthusiasm combined with the lengthy descriptions unfortunately made this tutorial a slog.
