course correction
Writing
The writing in this game is overall pretty good! The world feels realized without resorting to too much unnecessary info-dumping (although some of the conversations with Horatio walked the line). The characters have clear and unique personalities and Constance has a distinct character arc that is satisfyingly resolved regardless of what ending you pick (and all feel natural, as the consequence of being put in an impossible situation.) I did find Constance’s dialogue to be jarringly modern at times in contrast to other characters, probably as a consequence of establishing her as an independent free spirit unafraid to speak her mind. Further editing passes probably would have smoothed this out and brought her into line with everyone else, but that’s the nature of the competition!
Overall, I found all of the characters compelling and interesting. I wanted to see what would happen to them and how their story would end. It took me a minute to understand the impact of the final capsa being located in the nursery but once I got it: oh, how heartbreaking.
Also, enemies to lovers bird yuri (possibly lovers to enemies to lovers bird yuri)? Sign me right up.
Playability
There were some lumps and bumps along the way here, as expected for a game made on such a short timeline. I found the chase sequence hard to parse, and while I only died twice on it I’m still not 100% sure what I actually did to beat it. (Using the speed capsa and diving enough seems to do it, but it required a bunch of trial and error. The down capsa felt like it should have been helpful but I never quite figured out how to use it.)
The bigger issue was a big glitch when I first took over as Horatio - as I navigated out of the prison I got some room text that was clearly written for Constance, confusing me as to who I was controlling. (Sorry I forgot to save a transcript, Lucian – I’ll see if I can recreate this later.)
But none of this got in the way of going from one scene to another and making steady progress towards the end of the game, so given the time crunch it’s understandable! I think it could be cleaned up a lot in a post-comp release.
Design
The design here relies on a tried and true formula, as Mathbrush pointed out – it’s a linear game with one challenge after another, but never in a way that gets old. I think it helps that the challenges are varied. First you have to explore the Aerie, then you trigger a chase sequence, then you’re navigating around as a different character, and so on, which helps keep interest high. Each segment is giving the player something new to do or think about! The long expository sequence with Horatio in the middle is also bookended by scenes of an entirely different texture, which helps it feel more like a palate cleanser between courses instead of something that stops the momentum of the game.
The only fly in the ointment I felt in this category was the 3D layout of the Aerie, as Lucian predicted - representing a 3D space in a 2D medium is no mean feat, but it could have been a lot more straightforward and as a result I spent the early game stumbling awkwardly around a place the player character is supposed to know well.
Inventiveness and Challenge Ingredient
The flip side of using a tried-and-true design is that the inventiveness here is mostly in the story. I love the concept of the scrolls and the abilities they grant, and I think that it succeeds at making a fascinating story in a fascinating world! But in terms of gameplay I would have liked to see a better attempt at integrating the scrolls and their abilities. Of the five scrolls in the story: Two are only important to the plot, one is the solution to a puzzle and kicks off a big (scripted) ruckus, and the remaining two can optionally be used in the chase sequence. I would have liked to see those last two be mandatory, and maybe for some of them to be relevant in another puzzle.
On the plot front of course the challenge ingredient is very well integrated! The various scrolls are key to every step in the plot, from genesis to evolution to climax. And the exact nature of these scrolls feels specific and well-thought; these can’t be replaced by any old magical MacGuffin. I’m not sure Lucian could have done any better here.
The Van der Nagel Papyrus
Writing
The Van der Nagel Papyrus is not a story focused game. How then, do I judge it on the same playing field as course correction? It’s not easy, but I can look at what I think each game is trying to do with the writing and judge them accordingly.
Since TVDNP is a puzzle game, the writing here exists mostly to support the puzzles. And to that end I think it works well! Descriptions are short but evocative, and while the humor isn’t as pervasive as it is in the previous Veeder games I think I actually prefer this more understated mode – there are funny moments, and they pop more when contrasted with the more workmanlike regular prose. We also get a good sense of the mansion and its rooms as well as the kind of people the Van der Nagels were.
I think my biggest gripe is that the writing feels sparse relative to the size of the game. I understand that this is entirely due to the time limit and the number of things that needed to be described, but I feel that reining the scope in a bit would have allowed the writing to get more focus.
Playability and Design
I need to talk for a minute about puzzle hunts.
A puzzle hunt is an event where people or teams solve puzzles – easy, right? But they follow a specific structure. Solve the first part of the puzzle, and then use another technique to extract a word or phrase that will be used in another puzzle down the road. The types of puzzles and extraction techniques can be extremely varied, but if you do enough you start learning the common tricks. Numbers between 1 and 26 can be turned into letters of the English alphabet, a question spelled out can imply an answer, and of course the first letters of a phrase often spell out an answer or a hint. So when I saw the last one was explicitly called out as a technique needed to complete the game, I knew what was going on, and I kept my eye out for more puzzly elements. I am the least useful member of my puzzle team when it comes to word trickery, but at this point I am at least well attuned to the signs of it happening!
IF and puzzle hunts seem like they go together hand in hand, and there’s definitely a subset of the IF community that’s into both, but given the time investment required the overlap isn’t as extensive as one might expect. The fact that I personally have experience with both is a happy accident as they were both pandemic pastimes I got sucked into and then stuck with. (This was in fact the genesis of EJ and I’s otherwise-pretty-mid game Starbreakers that was inspired by having spent the previous year doing nothing but puzzles and IF for fun. It needed at least another month in the oven, but it is inspired by the same tradition as TVDNP.)
When things opened up again my team and I started attending in-person puzzle hunts, and at one of these I learned a framework for puzzle design that’s stuck with me ever since. Each puzzle in this event was given a difficulty rating in terms of both “hammers” and “lightbulbs” – hammers to represent the amount of grunt work required to reach a conclusion, and lightbulbs to represent the amount of lateral thinking or brain bending required. I’ve found this to be a really useful shorthand for puzzle design both in hunts and in IF, especially in terms of what needs to be tweaked in order to make something fun. You want to mix up the types of puzzles you have, you want most puzzles to have both elements in some proportion, and you want to avoid the common pitfalls of each type. (These metrics are a measure of difficulty, not of quality, but if you do enough you’ll see patterns in which difficult puzzles are fun versus which feel tedious or unfair.) The failure mode of a lightbulb-heavy puzzle is that it requires you to read the author’s mind or relies on a single piece of information that you either know or don’t. The failure mode of a hammer-heavy puzzle is that it requires a lot of tedious work relative to the payoff. (IF players should be intimately familiar with the former, since it’s what we call “moon logic”!)
I’ve written a bunch of words here that are very much not about The Van der Nagel Papyrus, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it.
The early game of TVDNP is, in my opinion, a delightful balance of hammers and lightbulbs. You’re exploring the map with the papyrus, you’re using the transformation mechanic to gather items and information, and you’re then using said items and information to solve puzzles, thereby unlocking even MORE items and information! It feels really good! And if you keep a good map[1] you discover patterns in the original room names and secret messages in the altered room names, which feels even better! Finding more information can be its own reward, and these information drips are well spaced relative to the effort required to obtain them. There’s still leaps of logic to be made (and ones that I certainly wouldn’t have made without help from other judges) but they felt fair and satisfying in retrospect. I was having a blast! This is the perfect marriage of IF and puzzle hunts!
And then I unlocked the Altar, and the game shifted into pure hammer mode.
The Altar is the mechanic that allows the player to rearrange the rooms of the mansion (moving rows and columns around in the normal version and rotating rooms around it in the altered version). This is a wildly, wildly ambitious mechanic even BEFORE you consider the time limit! So it’s not surprising that it’s rough. The puzzles from here on out all have to do with manually rearranging the map, again and again. The quality of life features you might expect are absent here due to the time limit as well – there’s no reset function, so saving and careful note-taking is paramount, and the map doesn’t automatically display after each move unless you think to use it on the altar. It’s easy to get into an unwinnable state. Expected synonyms are missing for the altered version, so using it requires fully typing PRESS CLOCKWISE or COUNTERCLOCKWISE instead of CW or CCW. Trial and error is the main way to make progress. All of these elements add to the hammer quotient of the game, and the amount of work you have to do in order to get another clue increases exponentially. Too much, for my tastes.
Due to poor notekeeping I was unable to fully reset the house after finding the fifth papyrus, leaving me worried that I had gotten myself into an unwinnable state. (I still don’t know if I did, as we never figured out which of the remaining leads to chase in order to get the sixth). By the end I felt like I was holding a bag of unanswered questions, and there’s no stopping point between the second and sixth papyrus that I feel would be satisfying.
The Van der Nagel Papyrus is an amazing, inventive, off-the-wall game that truly could have only come from the mind of Ryan Veeder. If polished up and submitted to IFComp, I have no qualms saying it would win. But I think this idea was just too big for the five days he was given, and in the end it feels underbaked. I can’t wait to see the game it becomes post-comp (which I think is going to be an all-time classic) but I have to judge on what’s in front of me today.
Inventiveness and Challenge Ingredient
Since I wrote a big wall of text for the previous section I’ll cut right to the chase here: this is one of the most inventive games I’ve ever seen. The papyrus that changes the in-game world as well as the meta-game world? The puzzlehunt elements? The complete disassembly-and-reassembly of the map? There’s nothing else like it.
Similarly, the challenge ingredient is well used at every step. Both the light story and the main gameplay mechanic revolve around retrieving and using the Van der Nagel Papyrus to change the world around you! My only quibble is that I wish the Altar had been powered by the second papyrus instead of being, as far as I can tell, unrelated, but that’s a minor gripe. Full marks here, because I am truly blown away by the craft Afterward has demonstrated.
Conclusion
When I added up all the points I assigned to both games, I found myself with two things: a tie, and a dilemma. How do you choose between two equally matched yet wildly different dishes? How do you even compare a game like course correction to The Van der Nagel Papyrus? How can I execute my responsibilities as a judge? What is the meaning of life?
I decided that the tiebreaking element here should be completeness. Which author’s game best fit the scope of the competition? Which dish was closer to the ideal version of itself? I know I’m judging on what’s in front of me, but I decided to consider the gulf between what is and what could be. And on that metric, course correction comes out on top. I’m looking forward to the polished post-comp version, of course, but anyone playing it is mostly going to benefit from editing and bug fixing. I don’t think there’s any significant design changes that need to be made, so the experience of someone playing it now isn’t going to be radically different from someone playing it next year. Meanwhile, TVDNP has some truly dizzying heights it can ascend to in the future, but only if a lot of thought is put into how to balance the effort of Altar puzzles with their rewards. Maybe some simple quality of life features could get it there, or maybe some greater design challenges need to be considered. In the end, that part isn’t up to me.
What is up to me, of course, is the final scoring. And by this metric course correction is the more complete dish and therefore gets my final vote.
(By the way, Afterward, the judges did solve the easter egg puzzle and I laughed pretty hard. I promise not to spill the beans until after the audience has voted!)
(I had some trouble keeping a good map on account of the Cats of War, but that’s on me.) ↩︎