2017 was a wild year for IF, with eight of its games appearing in the IFDB top 100 and six of its games having been voted into the Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all Time over the years. But out of all of them, one has consistently been ranked the highest:
The Wizard Sniffer.
What makes it good?
Setting and Characters
I first knew Buster Hudson as the author of Oppositely Opal and Foo Foo, both charming games featuring magical characters (a witch and a fairy, respectively). Foo Foo especially did a great job of combining silly worldbuilding with deep and meaningful personal storylines.
That same combination is present in The Wizard Sniffer, but amplified. The game is set in a stereotypical, even satirical fantasy world, with witches, warlocks, heroes, dragons, and a high-interest rate bank that employs a personal army.
I’ve heard it said before that satire is most effective when done by someone who loves what they’re satirizing, and I feel like that’s the case here. While Ser Leonhart, our putative hero, has many flaws, some quite significant, he is also brave and strong. Our squire Tuck is hesitant and afraid but grows to be strong, like in a lot of classic fantasy stories (see Sam in Lord of the Rings or the children in Chronicles of Narnia). A powerful ally of the main enemy switches over to the hero’s side.
It also parodies adventure games. The beginning of the game features old chestnuts like Towers of Hanoi, a Rubik’s cube, etc…all in the trash. Later on, the enemy’s mother is working on a fiendish color-coded puzzle that Ser Leonhart simply demolishes in one hit. However, while it parodies those very artificial-feeling puzzles, it includes remixes of old classics, like a ‘treasure hunt’ where the treasure is humans; ‘strange device you tinker with’ puzzles when the ‘strange’ device is a mech suit with a flamethrower; and so on.
Each character has their own emotional journey. Two of them involve becoming aware of or accepting or being accepted in their sexuality or gender, a topic resonant with many readers. Not all the journeys are happy, especially with the older men.
Depth of implementation
This is a limited parser game, like Superluminal Vagrant Twin the year before. You play as a pig, incapable of almost any independent action. However, you have the trust (or earn the trust) of those around you, and they can follow you and respond to simple actions on your part.
Replaying this game, it’s shocking how bare many room descriptions are. More than half the rooms in this game are just connectors with hardly anything in them. For instance:
You stand at the foot of a curved staircase ascending to the west. A dimly-lit hall extends to the east.
Examining generally gives brief answers, too. So how is there ‘depth’ if there’s nothing to look at?
Depth comes through the characters that inhabit the world. There are at least 3 or 4 ways each room and interaction can be handled: alone, with Tuck, with Leonhart, with the Horror, or with Tuck and Leonhart together.
All the interactable parts of the game have to respond to all those possibilities together. This flips the standard IF paradigm around: instead of descriptions and interactions being tied to the world, with people as an added feature, the descriptions and interactions here are all connected to people, and the rest of the world is just set dressing. This is a model that could be endlessly imitated, and I’m taking notes now for my next game.
The game has a lot of neat tricks to keep you from getting confused. When you’ve brought the ball to the heroes as they requested, they grab it immediately, so you don’t have to drop it or give it to the heroes. Similarly, once you take the keys, it automatically handles you giving it to the players. Confusing situations are just omitted entirely.
Finally, this is a big game for how easy it is to play. Most games that are large rely on tricky puzzles or hidden objects to pad out gameplay (which can be very fun, like many Infocom games). But this game, despite being fairly easy, just has a lot of content. Replaying it took me quite a while.
Conclusion
Wizard Sniffer succeeds due at least in part to its vibrant setting and characters and to its depth of implementation involving multiple perspectives from multiple characters. It speaks on timely topics of interest to its current audience, the same way that early games like So Far spoke to their audience of diehard Infocom enthusiasts. This game will likely stay a favorite for many years.
Made with the support of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation
