Finally! I have thoroughly tasted and savoured the dishes, and now I am ready to share my reviews.
First, my numerical scores:
@Pacian:
-Writing: 10/10
-Playability: 8/10
-Design: 8/10
-Inventiveness: 8/10
-Challenge Ingredient: 9/10
@Draconis:
-Writing: 8/10
-Playability: 8/10
-Design: 8/10
-Inventiveness: 8/10
-Challenge Ingredient: 10/10
As you can see when you look at @otistdog’s list of full scores (or just by adding up the numbers…), Pacian’s game has one point more than Draconis’.
But! I excercise my right as Iron ChIF Judge to contradict the numerical score.
My choice for best game is Draconis’ Endymion!
Why? See the reviews below:
Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider (by @Pacian)
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.)
Two of your party of thievesadventurers are holding them back, but even mighty warrior Trala and her beautiful Elfin healer Lind cannot keep a raging Goblin horde ar bay indefinitely.
So it falls to the Stranger to find an escape, preferably one which would allow you to take a big pile of loot from under the Goblins’ noses. 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.
And that only leaves you. But what can you do, a nigh-invisible little Fairy (although your small physical size does not in any way diminish your grandiosity, of course…), except drawing the Stranger’s attention to various objects so he can scan them with his bleeping gadget, and guide him in finding ways to handle those objects once you’ve figured out what they do.
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!
But let’s not dwell on these similarities to other games, for Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider can certainly stand on its own. Besides being the protagonist, our little Fairy is the narrator of the action, and her perspective is a very opinionated one, to say the least.
Examining your fellow adventurers through the Fairy’s eyes immediately gives an evocative impression of their personalities and of the relationships between them, as they relate to the Fairy. Which may not be exactly true to reality…
You see, our little Fairy has a rather grand image of herself… She might be said to be full of herself… Or even egocentrically deluded… An altogether unreliable narrator, even if in essence well-meaning.
Her twisted view of reality is not limited to the people around her. The objects in the cave, from mundane to more exotic, are named and described with as much confidence as inaccuracy.
The Fairy’s idiosyncratic descriptions of her surroundings provide a welcome deepening and mirroring of the original challenge ingredient.
The Stranger holds a gadget (a cross between a magic wand in appearance and a metal-detector in sound-effects…), which emits various bleeps and bloops when pointed at objects.
“a device that emits one or more mysterious messages in a non-human language”
A bit of experimentation, and especially a high degree of attention to the correlations and similarities between the noises when pointed at various objects, allow us to deduce the meaning of specific sound-effects, and also to associate one object with another. These associations form the basis for trying to nudge the Stranger into trying to interact with o items, or to use one on another.
Basic puzzle-solving hindered by a layer of cryptic sound-effects.
However! The Fairy is almost as ignorant about the contents of the cave as the Stranger is. Not that you would know it from the confident tone with which she describes and names everything around her, but the fact that she casually uses nouns like “thingamajig” and “doohickey” as if they were the real names of things does feed the suspicion that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
It’s almost cute how she manages to radiate such confidence while bluffing her way around her own utter lack of comprehension. (If it weren’t so frustrating at times, that is…) At the same time, I felt a bit sorry for her, having to balance such a delicate scaffolding for her inflated image of self-worth by pretending to know all about this stuff, or insisting that stuff that she doesn’t understand is obviously beneath her.
I’m quite certain that she believes her own fictions.
All this to drive home the point that the Fairy’s confident-but-misguided descriptions of reality present the player with a second layer of translation-problems. A layer full of near-understood whatsits and thingies. At times, I preferred the incomprehensible clarity of the gadget’s chu and lulula noises which it kept warbling happily.
A cool translation puzzle in a deliciously funny little world described by a wonderfully unreliable narrator.
Endymion (by @Draconis)
A crash in orbit, a plummetting fall, a desolate ice-moon. Stranded on Europa, your mining craft (and the radio in it!) reduced to a useless hunk of metal. Your only hope: investigate the alien vessel you crashed into, and find some means of escape before the churn of the ice swallows every trace of you.
The harsh reality of this is quite shockingly emphasised:
> INVENTORY
You and your suit seem to be intact, at least, which is more than you can say for your ship. Bruised, exhausted, alone, and with no way to call for help. But intact.
You have a few weeks’ supply of oxygen and nutrients and a full battery.
But then:
> X ICE
You’ll never find any footprints or old probes on Europa. The whole moon is covered in miles-thick ice, freezing and melting and re-freezing with the tides and sweeping any detritus down to the ocean underneath. In another orbit—84 hours, give or take—it’ll be like the crash never happened.
The view of Jupiter rising above the horizon of the icy surface of Europa into the starry pinpricked expanse emphasises the hopelessness of your situation. It’s almost a relief to enter the relative safety of an unknown alien spacecraft.
Fortunately, the beings who built it valued clarity and user-friendliness: the craft is filled with labels and instructions on most every surface.
Unfortunately, you don’t speak Alien.
But, again, fortunately, the aliens were of the logical kind, their language seemingly artificially constructed from first principles. With plenty of labeled material for comparison at your disposal, it should be possible to use your powers of deduction to extract enough meaning at least to be able to access the resources on this spaceship.
The interior of the alien ship is mostly described in clear functional sentences. Necessarily so, the player already has a fully alien language to decipher. It wouldn’t do to cloud the visual image of their surroundings with complex ornate prose. Occasional messages about the protagonist’s precarious circumstances break through the functionality of the room-descriptions, and the outside view of the indifferent icy surface in the introduction contrasts with the cramped insides of the alien craft. It was an impressive shift of atmosphere when, in the middle of my explorations inside the ship’s few rooms, I was teleported back outside and the enormity of the Jovian system fell upon me unexpectedly.
The language that the author of Endymion has constructed serves as a screen behind which a number of easy obstacles are hidden. Straightforward puzzles remain obscure until the player graps at least the basic words and structure of the alien language.
The real obstacle, then, is one of translation.
For this purpose, the author has provided a dictionary function where alien words are memorised (either in the protagonist’s brain, or perhaps in some sort of spacesuit computer?), and where the player can input their guesses about the human meanings of the words found throughout the ship. Translated words are then automatically inserted into any other alien sentences found.
An impressive technical feat, and one which I deliberately and completely ignored.
Oh, I did my best to deduce the exact definitions of all the alien words on my first survey of Endymion. I got frustrated and put the game aside for the following day. When I restarted, I had realised that pinning down definitions for the alien words was actually hampering my linguistic intuitions. By cementing a guess of a word’s meaning in the dictionary, it got stuck as that-and-only-that word in my brain. Also, when a translated dictionary word later appeared in another alien sentence, the English intrusion disrupted my ability to engage with the Alien in a fluid and intuitive way.
Once I ditched all efforts to fill in the dictionary, I made much better headway. My mind was continuously filled with broad clouds of meaning for specific words. I searched for relations and similarities and structure on a more intuitive level. The VOCAB command (where the player can, if they so wish…, type in their definitions in the dictionary), was still of immense assistance to me. I used it to see which words appeared multiple times, and on which objects they appeared, and to look for similarities in word-structure. Just not for building a definite vocabulary.
“It is only in the context of a sentence that words have meaning.”
Gottlob Frege – Die Grundlagen Der Arithmetik (1884)
Loosely paraphrased as I use it when I think about language: “The sentence is the primary meaning-carrying unit of language.”
Reading the alien multi-word phrases in alien helped me get a natural, intuitive, vague-but-meaningful feeling of almost-understanding, which was a lot more helpful to me than pinning an Alien word to an English word one-on-one.
Approaching the alien language from this open perspective gave me the perceptive basis for the flash of insight I got when I grokked the final puzzle. A great sense of victory and accomplisment suffused me, and I sat staring in the distance a good while longer before actually going through the motions of recording and transmitting my message to the stars.
That feeling of great satisfaction, of wrestling up a steep learning curve, feeling my way around a new set of meanings, and finally grasping enough of it to solve my protagonist’s predicament… The sense of winding through and around a hard problem with my mind and coming out the other side with a new understanding…
That is why my personal choice for the winner of Iron ChIF is Endymion.
When I sent my scores, Otisdog asked me to confirm that I wanted to contradict my numerical score and choose the lesser rated (by 1 point) of the games as the winner.
This is my response:
Yes, I’m aware. It’s that feeling of victory after beating a really hard challenge that made me choose Endymion, and we don’t have a scoring category for
“How good do you feel about yourself and your bragging rights after playing the game?”