The Gnomish Treasury
Most media about archaeology focuses on the fieldwork—going out to a dig site, surveying the area, having fantastical adventures (optional), collecting and cataloguing the artifacts, then bringing them back to a museum.
But there’s also a lot of archaeology that happens after that point! The clay pots and bronze weapons don’t just sit in storage forever; there’s research to be done on them, and conservation to make sure they stay in good shape, and occasionally a shocking discovery when a previously-overlooked bit of papyrus turns out to preserve a few missing words from a vital historical document.
That’s what The Gnomish Treasury is about, so (if it wasn’t obvious) I’m delighted from the start. It’s set in a “standard D&D fantasy” world, where the evil warlord Skarnfang has just been defeated and his treasure vaults broken open. The gnomish kingdom, led by His Highness Thistlebloom IX of the House of Meadows, has tasked you—the most illustrious student of the great Professor Berrybramble at Mossford University—with examining and cataloguing the gnomish artifacts recovered from Skarnfang’s fortress. Fantastic premise, and played completely straight.
While the gameplay loop is fairly straightforward—examine various damaged artifacts, figure out what pieces go together, and repair them—the descriptions never get repetitive. Each puzzle solved gives you new tidbits about the world:
You recall the history behind the artifact noted on the list. Thistlebloom I, the ancestor of today’s monarch, shared a cup of mead from this drinking horn with Queen Hrogark of the orcs. The gesture formally signified the gnomish king’s claim to the region of Gorseland in exchange for orcish trade, which ended a thousand years of territorial disputes and established a longstanding alliance between the two peoples.
Which makes it feel like actual archaeology, not just medium-sized-dry-goods manipulation. It is sometimes undercut by implementation issues: various shards of pottery are numbered, for example, but Inform doesn’t accept TAKE 2 AND 6, because the parser interprets the numbers as “take 2 unspecified objects and 6 unspecified objects”. (The usual workaround is to make them the “first shard”, “second shard”, and so on.)
Still, I enjoyed this game greatly. I don’t know how good it is as an introduction to text adventures as a whole—it doesn’t lean into that style of puzzle—but I had a wonderful time playing it, and will recommend it to some gnome fans I know. I finished with 20 points in 229 turns.
Tutorial
This tutorial is enabled by default without any action on the player’s part, which I think is the best strategy. Experienced players will try TUTORIAL OFF much more readily than new players will try TUTORIAL ON.
Before the first room description we’re given a slew of commands to try, including HELP, MAP, HIGHLIGHTS, SAVE, RESTORE, UNDO, CREDITS, and HINT; those could, I think, have been spaced out better. The player probably won’t have to UNDO until later in the game, and giving so many suggested commands at once makes it harder to remember each individual one.
The final suggestion given on that first turn is LOOK, and that suggestion is repeated over and over every turn until we take the hint. I appreciate that the game lets me ignore the suggestion if I want (I can instead try HELP or examine things), but the repeated prompting can quickly become grating.
It does pay attention to which actions I’ve already taken: it suggests LOOK, X ME, INVENTORY in that order, but if I examine myself before looking, it skips that step. It does not pay attention to anything except those exact commands, though, so if I’ve examined something else, it still teaches me the EXAMINE verb (over and over) until I’ve examined myself specifically.
The actions being taught are relevant, and the game shows off some nice quality-of-life features in the process. You automatically examine something when you take it, for example, avoiding the tedium of GET OBJ / X OBJ every time—but, only if you haven’t examined it yet. Interactible objects are highlighted in bold, not just in room descriptions, but everywhere in the text; this leads to an inconsistent grayness, but it does draw the eye to what’s important, so I can see the rationale behind it. The tutorial calls attention to some of these features, as well as some of the standard shortcuts, like taking multiple objects at once.
Interestingly, the tutorial doesn’t solve the first puzzle for the player. It gets you most of the way there, but you need to supply the last step on your own. I really like the way that’s executed in this case; it ensures that players don’t just zone out and follow the tutorial by rote. Once that puzzle is solved, the tutorial kicks back in to guide you to the next one before shutting off.
Overall, I would rank this tutorial just below Epic Expedition’s. It loses points for repeating the tutorial messages every turn and not recognizing when you’ve done the right action on the wrong object, but otherwise it’s a fantastic introduction to the game.