What a feast for those lucky enough to judge this inaugural clash of competitors! We’ve been on the edge of our seats, savoring each hint the chefs dropped of what was to come, and now all that’s left is to taste, assess, and pronounce a judgment!
Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider
Structurally, ATSS is about as stripped-down as it gets: it’s a one-room game with the most limited parser imaginable (all you can do is type a noun), and while it offers a meaty enough play-time, there’s really only one medium-dry-goods puzzle – everything you do is in service of getting an ancient machine working to allow the trio of adventurers, including two fantasy stereotypes and the eponymous arachnid, to find the other part of the title. But this simple skeleton is slathered with sauces and seasonings, full of clever turns of phrase, narrative twists, and smoothly satisfying gameplay.
The voice of the main character – a fairy who seems as though they must be especially conceited, though might actually just be typical of their species – is the most immediately engaging element of the dish. There are a lot of things to examine as soon as you start playing, as is typical in one-room games, and this initial infodump is chock-full of jokes and character beats as well as the helpful information you actually need to solve the puzzles:
But before you get anywhere near [the skylight] you are jerked ungracefully to a halt. Of course! The memory of the silver thread of silk that tethers you to the stranger must have fallen out of your little head, probably pushed out by the many clever thoughts in there.
Or this response to checking out a deactivated automaton:
You fly right into the shiny man’s face to assert dominance. He is frozen to the spot in fear. But Trala and Lind completely ignore the way you are guarding their rear!
As is also the rule when all the action plays out in one room, there’s a nicely telescopic approach, with a few distinct sub-areas, each of which has its own sub-elements, like a desk with objects both on top of it and under it. And while there’s a good amount of stuff to interact with, the quantities aren’t overwhelming, which is good since there’s a lot for the player to keep track of and the fairy, being unfamiliar with the workings of the ancients, resorts to labels like “doohickey” and “rigamajg”. The fairy can’t pick things up or do anything except draw the stranger/spider’s attention to particular things; the spider will then point a gadget at the object, and depending on what it says and what they’re carrying in their hands, potentially take an action.
In practice this just means you need to do a little bit of typing to get the effect of “use X on Y”, but it’s a reasonable way to prevent the lawmowering that limited-parser games can sometimes be vulnerable to. The other strategy here hinges on the language-device that is the competition’s challenge ingredient: often objects that can be useful combined have the same or related sounds associated with them. This meant that I wound up taking a lot of notes, as there’s a wide variety of (pleasantly onomatopoetic) noises, and the various generic object names were tough to keep in my head – but filling out my little chart was a fun process, and allowed me to make steady progress through the various challenges.
While there’s a bit less character interaction than I’d perhaps hoped from the previews, solving puzzles does trigger little cut-scenes at regular intervals, allowing the adventurers to bandy about some banter and escalate the stakes. And while it’s not the main focus of the piece, there’s surprising depth here, with all the characters misperceiving something about their situation and their companions (the fairy thinks the others find them more compelling than they actually do, Trala and Lind don’t recognize the spider, the spider is pursuing a romance that will doom him, and even the goblins aren’t what they seem!). It makes for a nice thematic counterpoint to the way the player must interpret the made-up language and the fairy’s unhelpful labels for what they see in order to understand what’s really going on, and also pays off in the finale, which indicates that the fairy might have gained a glimmer of self-awareness by the end.
Endymion
I don’t have a head for languages. I have friends who travel and pick up a few snatches of phrases wherever they go, who do Duolingo in their spare time and get comfortable with a couple dozen phrases and can use that to bootstrap a basic conversation. Me? I cling onto a couple years of high-school French and Latin and wish foreign vocab stuck in my brain instead of going in one ear and out the other. All of which is to say that I’m not at all surprised that I found Endymion too hard, even as I dug the process of plugging one completely-incorrect translation after another into the game’s slick alien-language system.
For all that this is a mechanics-first game, the writing in the opening is evocative, effectively getting across the abiotic beauty – and danger – of space:
Empty ice under an empty sky. The stars glare down like sterile pinpricks of light, cold and unmoving without an atmosphere to make them shine. Jupiter hangs low on the horizon behind you, bathing the wastes in a sickly light.
It’s a standard crashed-spaceship setup (subtype 4: escape by exploring an alien ship), but enlivened by details like the fact that Europa’s ice melts and re-freezes every three days, putting quite the ticking clock on matters, and providing more than enough scaffolding for the giant translation-puzzle at the heart of the thing. And here, just as expected Endymion excels, with flexible mechanics for making your guesses and a plethora of vocabulary-words on offer to tantalize you with meanings that are just out of reach. What I hadn’t expected was how well the game would implement the full challenge ingredient, which is not just the non-human language, after all, but the device that emits said language. The doohickey is of course a godsend, central to all your efforts because it turns the various inscriptions you find into audible text, but it’s also got a pleasing physicality to it – you don’t start with it, for one thing, and a few late puzzles require you to manipulate it in delightfully concrete ways.
As for the aforementioned difficulty, I think for the most part it’s fair – I was interested to realize that while I mostly did OK with nouns and verbs, pronouns and adverbs really tripped me up, which I think is down to my lack of facility at thinking about the structure of languages – but there are some pieces of the design that feel like the unnecessarily exacerbate the core challenge. On the one hand, the early stages are in some ways too lenient, and don’t have bottlenecks that require the player to have mastered the words they’ve encountered so far, since the puzzles in the first two-thirds of the game are pretty easy to blunder through via trial and error (especially since PUSH, PULL, and TURN are all mapped to the same action) – this allowed me to make solid progress, but also meant I was piling up a comprehension-deficit that left me blinking as I entered the endgame. But then those endgame puzzles are arguably too open-ended, with the final one in particular feeling like it could have been made simpler or at least broken down into smaller steps (Do the aliens really require their distress calls to be properly punctuated, rather than just broadcasting the coordinates?). There are also places where some small infelicities make things harder than they ought to be – I was stymied for a bit because I didn’t understand the descriptions of the disks to indicate them to be as large as they turned out to be, and the handy VOCAB command seamlessly kept track of the running glossary, but frequently gave confusing information about where new inscriptions had yet to be encountered (now that I’m writing this, I suspect this might have something to do with the pouch, so I’m not sure there are actual bugs here, but it was confusing!)
Fortunately – and miraculously, given the time pressure! – there are invisiclues hints available, so I was able to make it to the end, albeit led by my nose through some of the final stages. And heck, in real life I enjoy being a tourist and nodding benignly as an incomprehensible babble swirls around me, so much the same holds true for IF!
The match-up
(Note – my ratings aren’t making any accommodation for the fact that these games were written in a ridiculously short period of time and without any provision for testing; to get a 10 on anything, we’re talking Hadean Lands or Queenlash levels of impressiveness).
Writing
Both entries are well-written, with prose that’s engaging and works to communicate the information the player needs to proceed. ATSS has a more playful narrative voice and benefits from having more business to attend to, with its trio of NPCs and self-aware irony; Endymion’s writing makes for a strong opening, but winds up fading into a background level of functionality once the player starts engaging with the meat of the game, and as mentioned I did find it sometimes gave me a slightly-incomplete view of my situation.
ATSS 8, Endymion 6.
Playability
I think of this category as being all about flow, and being immersed in my experience of the game’s world. Neither game has any bugs to speak of – I noticed a double-period in Endymion but that’s about it – but Endymion’s difficulty did hurt it on this score, as my need to consult hints led to juddering start-stop progress. ATSS meanwhile has some real moments of elegance – having a statuette of the Goddess findable after a bit of poking-around makes for a nicely diegetic reminder of the prayer-based hint system – though the need to sometimes resort to lawnmowering loses it some points.
ATSS 7, Endymion 6.
Design
I can’t give an edge to either game here; both are well-conceptualized, with a clear vision shaping each part of the implementation. ATSS’s pulp action and Endymion’s chilly intellectual puzzle are very different in terms of vibes, of course, but both these games know what they want to be and leverage their author’s distinct strengths.
ATSS 8, Endymion 8.
Inventiveness
It’s not an insult to either competitor, I hope, to note that their efforts were focused more on implementation than on novelty. While Dialog, as a newer platform, doesn’t have games exactly like these, neither ATSS’s one-room limited parser structure nor Endymion’s translation system are wholly new under the sun, and in fact both have pretty high-profile antecedents. Similarly, there’s no shame in relying on classic storytelling tropes (crashed spaceship, dungeon crawl) for a short game made under such intense time pressure. Ultimately I give a slight nod to ATSS, because it manages to use its sometimes-obfuscated narrative and mechanics to lend freshness its occasionally bog-standard medium-dry good puzzles (getting an elevator to run by plugging in power cords and replacing fuses has never been so novel!).
ATSS 7, Endymion 8
Challenge Ingredient
Finally, a category where it’s easier to pick a clear winner! ATSS does a fine job of building around the ingredient, but the language functions more as a puzzle element than a plausible system of communication (often, a tool and the thing you use it on evoke the same “word”), and the device itself isn’t especially notable. Endymion, on the other hand, goes whole hog on the theme, implementing the alien language with rigor and ensuring that the device qua device is important in its own right.
ATSS 6, Endymion 9.
Winner
Oh, what a nail-biter – those totting up points at home will see that this is a squeaker, with ATSS coming in just one point ahead of Endymion. I’ve hemmed and hawed over whether to exercise my prerogative to override the cruel tyranny of numbers and nonetheless award the laurel to our Iron ChIF, since they’re the clear winner on what’s arguably the most important category, and Endymion lost many of its points only for being ever-so-slightly underdone; there’s a place for rewarding audacity and clarity of purpose at the expense of execution, after all.
But that place is not Keyboard Stadium, and our challenger was plenty audacious too; if he relied more on his own signature seasonings than the intrinsic flavor of the featured ingredient, the result doesn’t taste less delicious for that.
This was an exquisitely balanced competition, with more-than-worthy meals offered up by both of our chefs – I bow to their skills and thank them for their efforts! But since I am forced to choose, I judge that our challenger’s concoction comes out ever so slightly ahead.