Judge Wade’s scores for Challenger Pacian’s Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider
Writing 10
Playability 7
Design 9
Inventiveness 10
Challenge Ingredient 10
(46/50)
I gave Pacian’s dish a higher overall score of the two and resultantly picked it as my choice for the winner.
Evaluation
Overall I am amazed by this game. Written under pressure in five days with no external testers, I expect it could place high in IFComp as it stands. Its effect feels new and memorable.
A reminder that the challenge seed was just an object:
a device that emits one or more mysterious messages in a non-human language
Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is an extremely entertaining game which explores many facets of language and communication differences. It presents a team of four protagonists working together. All are of different races, only two speak English, the third is a non-speaking being whom the others don’t even know what they are, and the fourth, the PC, knows almost everything but can only convey it from their own perspective. That perspective is the conceited, joyful and ideologically enclosed one of a fairy, an incredibly charming one for the player to experience but also one of veiled comprehensibility. The fairy’s voice is too soft to communicate directly with the other protagonists, so she has to physically demonstrate her ideas to the mysterious third protagonist by flying close to relevant objects.
These communication problems are further multiplied by the matrix of the world. The protagonists are on a shared quest, but there are at least three different motives in play amongst them. In narration and writing terms, the protagonists aren’t concealing their motives, but they have no reason to expose them, so it’s in the play space of the game for the player to also speculate on what everyone really wants. Mental overload is avoided by the mind-sharpening-ness of the game’s main puzzle for the player: Working out how to escape from the cavern as hordes of goblins close in.
Directed at targets by the player’s fairy-guidance of the stranger, the stranger’s machine produces sounds which act as a kind of relational analysis to the fairy. Sometimes it’s the intonation or vibe of the sound which matters most. Connections can be found by comparing similar-sounding items, complementary-sounding items, and in what I thought was a particularly good moment during the puzzle, the fairy’s anticipation of a sound which didn’t happen, indicating to the player something new to try, even as the stranger remained none the wiser.
The game’s density of communication, language and narration layers is outsized of the game itself and the time given to produce it. This is why I give it 10 for Inventiveness and 10 for use of the Challenge Ingredient. Even the coda continues the theme, showing the goblins as misunderstood.
I’ve also given 10 for Writing. Writing is obviously thoroughly bound up with making all of the above possible, but I appreciated a lot of touches which accrued over the game. For instance, the rueful bits of world lore (e.g. the dead fairies, the fate of the spiders) which balance the fairy protagonist’s enthusiasm; I think her enthusiasm was well-tempered anyway by the selfish-leaning practicality of her tone. Nor were the rueful bits too heavy. They were just there, life-like, which happens to play to my personal taste. Also, cute responses hovering near the fourth wall in terms of acknowledging the game was written fast and would have been dodging a bunch of implementation, like -
x chamber
Probably carved into the mountain by the ancients. You know what they were like!
were not overused. There were a few, they were funny, but they didn’t get too cheap or cool (for school).
I also appreciated that the game didn’t let its romantic dimensions take over. The conclusion has the stranger finding their mate, and probably death, but there’s no rug-pulling in the writing suddenly giving this event more importance than the whole. The writing stays in the pocket of the fairy. Each protagonist is shown getting something they wanted, again still somewhat in their separate worlds, and the fairy thinks about what she’d like to do next.
In a relative sense, I’ve given Playability a 7. This for me was the only dimension where I felt the time constraint was affecting things consequentially. The game was making me laugh initially (and feel a little overwhelmed) with its telescoping inventory of doodads, whosits and thingies. I began taking notes as soon as I started, and I tried to use them, but they proved inadequate to the task so I still couldn’t keep track of everything. Hence came the times of lawnmowering. It was reasonably directed lawnmowering but I suspect it might not have happened if I’d been able to manage the contents better.
I think the game’s in a tough position in that being mostly a one-room game, having a system in place to track the sounds objects had made might be experienced as overkill. Yet such a system’s what I felt would have helped a lot. The game still wielded some good time-saving fobs – the rejection noises from the machine, the messages about how the stranger had lost interest in pointing the machine at particular objects at different times, etc. And I encountered almost no bugs of significance, in spite of Pacian’s frequently expressed worry during the battle’s second half that there would be plenty.
Note that I recalled, after finishing the game, that I had not looked at the mentioned ABOUT or CREDITS commands. Forgetting to review these commands later the way I’d planned to is testimony to how much I was sucked into the game upon boot. So I played without seeing how the PRAY command altered the experienced, but I also finished without needing external hints or human help.
I’ve given Design a 9. That’s really just a point I’ve taken off through the prism of the playability issues. For the design overall, I return to the adjective amazing.
For the showcase language, Pacian’s game also demonstrates how easy it may be to begin and assemble a limited parser game in Dialog. I can speak for Inform 7, where starting off by having to apply a subtractive approach to its labyrinth of grammar is a fair bit of work. I had to do this for Leadlight Gamma which is not a limited parser game but does have an 8-bit parser that I needed to port faithfully from the Apple II.
-Wade