Sure! I already sent a PM to cvaneseltine via the forum, but if you want to reach out via other channels, that’s fine. If not, it’s not a big deal to swap it out with the next eligible replacement (which is It is Pitch Black).
Ravine was a pretty straightforward CYOA type of story, which plays very smoothly and offers multiple endings. It’s certainly entertaining enough for its comp-length play time, with some turns that were unexpected even within a story that signals pretty strongly that the player should expect the unexpected. Thanks for recommending it, Ordon!
I had been planning to next try 18 Rooms to Home, but since that game is currently unavailable, I’ll instead skip up to Moon-Shaped at A8.
(Note that the big board now reflects the replacement of 18 Rooms to Home by It is Pitch Black.)
The main sense I’m getting from Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom is that I’m very much not the target audience. I’m trying to stick it out until I reach a good ending (it’s very easy to find a bad one), but there’s a lot of grinding to get my hit points up.
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I’m sorry to say I’m still distracted by Pokopia, but I did get my review of Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 up: Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917 - Details
I’m heading to Pageant next. I was tempted by Swigian, but I really want to hit Messages from the Universe Graveyard and can’t from there. Maybe I’ll come back to it if I finish the course before the deadline.
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This week’s update is up on the main thread. Only five weeks left until the end of the marathon, so hit some games this weekend if you can!
Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom complete!
*** VICTORY IS THINE ***
In that game you scored 437 out of a possible 500, in 1036 turns, earning you the rank of “Insurmountable Rogue”.
Warning: spoilers follow
I honestly found this game a bit disappointing. Most of its reviews are glowingly positive, and I’ve had fun with old-school games before, so I expected a lot out of this. And the expectations were…mostly not met.
This is a Conan the Barbarian pastiche where you’re limited to a small set of unusual verbs. You can REGARD things, SEIZE them, DISCARD them, TABULATE what has been seized, ASSAIL enemies…but of course you can also just EXAMINE, TAKE, DROP, INVENTORY, and ATTACK too, if you prefer. The most commonly-used verb is USE, which handles just about everything not on the above list. The result is that most puzzles involve finding the right object to USE, taking it to the right place, and USEing it, which gets you another item, rinse and repeat. (This does not, of course, prevent one single guess-the-verb puzzle where none of the thematic verbs work and you have to ENTER something.)
This get-X-use-X cycle is occasionally broken up by randomized combat in the Zork vein: the number of points you’ve earned determines how likely you are to hit, and the only useful action is to ATTACK over and over until either you’re dead or your enemy is dead. If you’re dead, UNDO and try again, or go find items that increase your hit points or damage.
Those items should in theory create a different axis of progression, but in practice they mostly end up acting as keys: one of them raises your hit points from 400-some to 1000-some, for example, so monsters will either be impossible to defeat without it or trivial to defeat with it. With no real tactics involved, I just ended up pressing up-enter-up-enter-up-enter to repeat the ASSAIL command 20 or 30 times in a row.
The other side of this game is the writing, which unfortunately didn’t really move me. There are a lot of jokes about sword-and-sorcery writing, but for me they mostly didn’t land; capitalizing all the nouns was funny for the first couple screens, but quickly became stale, and the three repeating jokes (“the barbarian is an idiot”, “all women find him attractive”, and “there’s no magic in this world, it’s all called science instead, but it basically works like magic”) likewise worked well at the start but lost their shine pretty quickly.
The DELICATE DOXY toys with a glittering RUBY NEEDLE set in her hair. “I do business with those of power and influence. One of the great WARLOCKS leading the rebellion against VIRAXIS gave me this, saying it has magic to pierce all, and that he longs to pierce my distant heart … The love-struck dear! WARLOCKS are romantics, you know. It draws them to magic.”
You glower and nod, uncertain of what the girl is talking about.
“I know many such clients … and those who share your hatred of the SLAVER KING are ready to form a SPY NETWORK at your command. What say you?”
You glower and nod, since it worked last time.
You can feel [the Psi-Witch] peering within your mind, and her expression is one of both amusement and disgust. “VESSA THE DELICATE DOXY believes you are some master political strategist, the poor girl. I suppose it would be kindness to let her continue believing. It gives her a fire, and an energy that pleases me. But she is very intelligent, VESSA … I do wonder what about you could blind her so. I wouldn’t think her to have such an obvious weakness for simple fitness and savagery, but I suppose, at my age, I should be surprised by nothing.” She REGARDS you quietly for a moment. “Your cranium is filled with meat, my friend, and not even the finest cuts.”
You nod grimly, thinking that this PSI-WITCH reminds you of VESSA a little, with all this prattling.
So the majority of the game, for me, unfortunately ended up just being a slog. Find a new item, figure out which locked door it will open (since I’d explored the whole map early on), open the door, get a new item, and repeat. Soon I turned to David Welbourn’s item list to tell me which items would be useful for which doors, and after dozens and dozens of turns of ASSAILing the final boss (Godzilla wielding a lightsaber and a tommy gun), it ended with a nice climactic moment: all the NPCs I’d met joined in and took out chunks of the boss’s health before dying gruesomely!
…and it kept happening. And kept happening. There were so many NPCs that what felt awesome with the first couple just became repetitive by the end. Each one appeared, explained how their story was about to resolve (e.g. the evil cultist decided he no longer had to kill the virgin sacrifice, they could get married instead), did some points of damage, then died gruesomely.
So when I finally got the boss’s health to zero (credit where it’s due: there was one tactical decision to make, a one-time-use healing item), it felt like an anticlimax. The healers came in and revived all the NPCs, the protagonist decided kingship wasn’t for him, and he left.
In the end, I think this is a solid game intended for a very different audience. Maybe other people would enjoy the jokes about sword-and-sorcery writing just as much the 20th time as the first time. But I am going to close with one piece of critique that I think is relevant to modern IF writers, too.
When writing a parody, it’s often tempting to say “look at this cliche, isn’t it annoying/boring/dumb?” In this case, Zorkian combat (and I’m assuming also Conan stories?) means just attacking over and over until someone’s hit points are zero, so this game ramps that up to eleven, and it’s the main thing you end up doing.
But the result is that you’re just subjecting the player/reader to something you consider annoying/boring/dumb. You’re partially laughing at the player instead of with them. I think it’s more fun to parody those sorts of cliches by subverting them in a way that makes for a fun experience, like in this case if the final boss had a million hit points so ASSAILing him did nothing and you needed some other solution.
(The particular instance that led me to formulate this idea is in Augmented Fourth, a parody of Enchanter and its ilk. Those games often had absurdly niche spells that did one thing and then were never used again, so Augmented Fourth has a spell that turns giant purple vault doors into hamsters. Which, yes, points out the cliche—but wouldn’t it be more fun to subvert it by finding other ways to use an absurdly niche spell? Consider Lucian Smith’s Course Correction, which takes one of those spells from the Enchanter games and builds it into the plot in a way that feels dramatic instead of ridiculous.)
P.S. This game also comes with very extensive paratext: a 35-page (!) rulebook for a tabletop RPG that the game was ostensibly based on. It’s undoubtably impressive, but I didn’t personally find it added much to my experience of the game, maybe because I wasn’t playing tabletop games in the 1970s (the era that this game is a pastiche of).
Next up: Xanthippe!
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I have completed the Axolotl Project and I will now move on to Ravine, as it was so heartily recommended earlier in this thread.
I enjoyed the game, but only somewhat. I liked the plot, which had loads of good ideas in it, though it was fairly silly and highly implausible science fiction.
The style of the game was choice-masquerading-as-parser, which ultimately I wasn’t a fan of. I could explore the map at will, and it felt like I was solving puzzles, but really, I was just clicking on stuff. It’s all very friction-free, but you can’t really fail to progress, and that doesn’t really work for me. I don’t believe your character can die, which I think was a mistake; the player should FEEL the danger.
There was also a problem with uneven tone. The plot is very serious and dark, but your character is a young and sassy intern, is what it boils down to. (Though she does make a lot of witty observations about stuff throughout.) This was especially a problem when conversing with other characters, where I would think, ‘I don’t want to say ANY of these things.’
I dislike it when your character is too strong because I don’t feel like I am fully immersed in the role.
I think I prefer choice games that are actually branching narratives, rather than this clever parser-like approach, hopefully Ravine will be more like that.
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