Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest
My Time: 98 minutes.
Ribald seems like a good word for this game. Or protagonist is a vampire/succubus sort of lady? Drinks blood, gains energy through sex, so we’re going to use that as an exuse to sprinkle the piece with a bunch of corny descriptions of sex? I don’t know who this is for: it didn’t feel particularly erotic or particularly funny to me, just… ok, whatever you enjoy writing, I guess.
Anyway. This is… an unevenly implemented puzzle parser with flashes of cleverness. The assassin chase at the end was a nice bit of design: use different senses to catch traces of your quarry who’s always just ahead of you, and manipulate the environment to trap them in a dead end. And it feels somewhat urgent, but it doesn’t punish you for losing the thread (or, y’know, going off and doing something else for a while instead): the last clue will still be where you left it if you need to backtrack to a place where you know you found a clue.
But then the descriptions are pretty uneven: some things lovingly described, some things unimplemented or with default descriptions. Consider the top of the temple (minor spoilers for the late-game but by this time you’ll have a handle on how the game works and breeze through this part even without hints, I think?).
Temple, third floor
Temple, third floor
Huge stone pillars ringed an altar of alabaster, the place open to the cool night air. This was a place of solitude and contemplation, where one could cast their eyes to the heavens. Above the altar, an ornate reliquary twinkled under the moon and stars.
>x altar
An elegantly simple block of stone, the altar seemed to have been untouched for some time.
>x pillars
Tall and mighty, they cast long shadows over the altar.
>x heavens
Moon and stars shone down amidst rolling, ghostly clouds.
>x stars
A vast field of tiny lights, they twinkled and shone.
>x moon
Lighting the path through the night, the moon was our heroine's constant travelling companion.
>x reliquary
The reliquary, decorated with a motif of drooping purple bittersweet, was closed.
>open reliquary
She opened the reliquary, revealing an inscrutable rod.
>x rod
She saw nothing special about the inscrutable rod.
[... then you find a phylactery hidden in the rod...]
>x phylactery
She saw nothing special about the phylactery.
If you didn’t want to be spoiled, the relevant thing is that the “heavens” and the “moon” and the “stars” all have their own descriptions when they could easily have been synonyms for the same thing, but then the plot-significant objects have “She saw nothing special about the X.”
It has a bunch of unnecessary map gating based on progress: there’ll be a perfectly good exit but you’ll get told you don’t have any need to go that way until you actually do need to go that way. That backfired for me: especially since the game starts with at least one dead-end exit; I assumed they were just a gentler edge of the map and then when I did need to go somewhere new I couldn’t think where there might be unexplored places. But it presumably took a bunch of work to implement that.
But on the other hand there are a bunch of descriptions that don’t change once you act on the item: an encyclopedia that is on a desk says “It was concealed beneath a handkerchief” whether it’s on the desk or if you’ve been carrying it around for a dozen turns.
I felt like most of the puzzles were underclued and you were more likely to stumble across the solutions by trying everything in every location rather than getting to feel clever because you figured out the puzzle and knew what to do. And the professor’s ritual was a cool puzzle but the others were pretty simple object puzzles so it felt out of place to be like, “On the too-small desk were a concealed yip encyclopedia, a satin stain and a heroic soaping iconographies.” You need a replacement ritual object for the encyclopedia: quick; what are you looking for?
And there were a bunch of map connections that change direction (so you go north, but then you have to go east to return). And things (I think)? that don’t fit neatly into the grid. And I think those were all buildings so it sort of makes sense to have the inside be a separate map but some of them were in/out connections and some of them were just cardinal directions, so it wasn’t clear which were supposed to be inside spaces. I don’t know. I can see the temptation to make the map more “interesting” but for me these kind of shenanigans just make it more confusing and more annoying to try and draw it out. Just make your maps fit neatly into a square grid, please?
And some red herrings (maybe? or maybe they’re optional treasures that I completely missed). A bunch of locations that seemed like in-between places where nothing happened. An apothecary’s shop that for sure felt like it was hinting that you could do something there but I have no idea what. Ditto the cat. You can name the cat and take it with you but… well, OK, I didn’t try to find out what the cat is for. But nothing immediately obvious: in my playthrough it was just there.
Anyway. I thought most of the puzzles and most of the through-line were good ideas but in practice I was more often left scratching my head over how I was supposed to figure it out rather than feeling clever. And the sex just felt kinda pointless to me: not my personal taste, I guess.
