At the top of my personal list of favorites from the 2024 IF comp was “Mrs Gosling’s Last Case”, by Daniel Stelzer. It is with some chagrin, therefore, that I had overlooked Mr Stelzer’s entry in this year’s comp, until just last Tuesday. This can happen when there are over eighty games in the comp, and I’m mostly only paying attention to the ones near the top of my randomized list.
“The Wise Woman’s Dog”, set 3300 years before “Mrs Gosling’s Last Case”, is in no sense a prequel, but the two works do share some striking parallels: Games written in Dialog, featuring a choice of hyper-text or full parser input, told from the POV of a dog helping its incapacitated human companion.
“Wise Woman’s Dog” includes just about every player convenience you can imagine; choice of parser or hypertext, onscreen interactive map, exits listing, path finding, in game hints, reminders of acquired knowledge, an original soundtrack, and comprehensive footnotes. The footnotes provide historical authenticity to this simulated Bronze Age world by documenting the research and evidence supporting this historical fiction, as well as authorial choices made for the sake of the story-telling.
Before I describe the very best feature of the game in the last paragraph, forgive me for this {criticism sandwich} I played on my laptop, and my screen view compressed the content to the middle third of the screen, as if I was playing on a handheld device. I had trouble seeing the text. There was an option for enlarged text, but I didn’t find that viewing very satisfying either, because of limitations on the amount of text visible between the command prompt and the top of the screen.{/criticism sandwich}
The quality of the puzzle design in “Wise Woman’s Dog” sets it apart not only from “Mrs Gosling”, but really from nearly anything I’ve played since Hadean Lands. Honestly, “Wise Woman’s Dog” should be analyzed as a case study by future puzzle designers. The magic system is initially simple (there are only six spells) but grows exponentially in complexity as the PC acquires techniques to modify and/or extend those spells to new situations. The game has a large open map, with multiple puzzles available to solve at any one time (never a gauntlet situation). There are multiple ways to solve some of the individual obstacles, and a variety of paths to achieve the same ends. I played for at least three hours before reaching a win state, and estimated (based on unexplored areas or unresolved situations) that I’ve only experienced about 70% of the game.
Thanks for writing this game.