Iron ChIF: Pilot Episode (Audience Commentary)

[Dissolved]

@rovarsson

The Goblins are at the gates! (Nevermind that those are the Goblins’ own gates, or that they’re just trying to stop you from stealing their own hard-won treasure.)

Just makes me wonder how the treasure got up there in the first place…

@rovarsson

But the Stranger seems, uhmm…, ill-adjusted to this plane of reality. He’s having trouble identifying simple objects and their functions, leaving him transfixed, unable to decide what to do.

I’m now imagining a game from the stranger’s perspective as being ye olde two word parser style.

@rovarsson

Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is a limited-parser game without even a single verb. All you need is nouns to direct the Fairy, and the Stranger’s attention, to the various objects around the room. This setup, with a near-powerless PC who needs to manipulate others to actually do stuff, bears resemblance to The Wizard Sniffer. Good company to be in, surely!

The game-world is restricted to one single room… Cave actually, which is more appropriate for Goblin treasure… Investigating the contents of the cave requires digging down through layers of implementation, a feather in a drawer in a desk for example. This produces a zooming effect reminiscent of Lime Ergot. Again, good company!

So to pull it altogether, a lot like Toby’s Nose? :​P

@rovarsson

which was a lot more helpful to me than pinning an Alien word to an English word one-on-one.

So the X MEANS Y mechanic actually made the puzzles harder?…

@otistdog

Do you think that the challenge ingredient used in this epsiode forced an interpretation along the lines of a translation puzzle for the player?

No, not really.