First game:Tales of the Travelling Swordsman by Mike Snyder.
This game placed 4th in the IFComp of 2006. I did not remember ever playing this game before, but I must have, because some elements seemed really familiar to me, especially the scene of spiders trying to steal crates of a flying ship. I don’t think I got much further in my original playthrough.
This new playthrough however was pretty smooth - I managed to figure out almost all solutions to the puzzles myself, only requiring to glance at the walkthrough twice; one of which was probably not needed if I had read the description of what happened when attacking the main villain more carefully. I really had fun.
There were several things I liked:
- Puzzles: I really enjoy parser games with puzzles. This game has quite a lot of them. And they were implemented in such a way that they (almost) never seemed too difficult or harsh. This was done in several ways which I may also include in my own game:
- Divided into several ‘acts’ with a small number of rooms and objects per act. This ensured I never was overwhelmed with things to do. Often the objective was quite clear, and the number of combinations of things to try small. The small areas also made it easy not to get lost.
- Hints: in the game itself there were several hints in the description on what could or could not work, things that pointed you in the right direction.
- I don’t think there was a way this game could be made unwinnable.
- Story:
- The story itself was about a hero (the travelling swordsman) travelling to save a village from evil, running into weird magical situations and strange characters to help on the way.
- There was an unexpected but fun twist in the end.
- I liked the different settings and characters described - I really had an image in my head when playing. Some were almost dreamlike. I was already thinking about possibly doing something with weird locations in my own game, inspired by the fantasy of my 3 year old son building weird structures with Duplo, like never-ending bridges leading nowhere. Some of these elements were in this game as well.
- There were ‘action scenes’ that increased the tension, while there was no actual time pressure or way to lose. This is also something I’d like to try in my own game - no failure possible, but increasing a sense of danger after all.