Fantasy Opera: Theater of Memory
by Lamp Post Projects
At a new opera house, all the performers are having dreams which, while not necessarily nightmares, are intense enough to interrupt their sleep and impair their ability to work; you’ve been hired to investigate the situation.
While this is fully standalone, Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade was the only one of Nell’s three (!) IFComp games that I played, so it was fun to be able to compare directly to its predecessor. This felt like a step up in every way.
The historical details felt more integrated into the story; there were a few didactic moments but much less than Mischief’s constant “here, let me infodump at you” (yes, thank you, I do know what a cornetto is, get out of my face). The prose still consistently has just a little of the same superficiality though. It does have things to say but says them all out loud, where a novel might leave a lot more of it to subtext. It’s a thing you see a lot in fanfic writers, or in new novelists and short story writers, people who haven’t learned to trust their readers yet. But this is otherwise very competently written so I have to wonder if it’s a deliberate stylistic choice? I don’t know. It’s not blatant, and a lot of video game writing is intentionally up front about things. But personally I don’t love it here.
The investigation felt smoother here too, and I thought the epilogue did a good job of explaining the things that you failed to guess correctly. It was more stuff than I was willing to memorize, so placing the performers correctly was a lot of flipping back and forth between sections, but it was great that all the information was still available in the interface.
I wish the die rolls had been explained a little more, but the extra info felt like bonuses rather than necessities so it wasn’t a big deal. If I’m reading it right, you get to choose two out of three from Architecture, Magic, and Music: one of them you’re good at and have a 50% chance, one you’re OK at and have a 25% chance, and the final one you are locked out of. Similarly you choose Charm vs. Observation, 50% for one and 25% for the other.
The wrap-up choice of “who’s with you? Your partner, or this co-worker or that co-worker?” was a bit jarring since I don’t think any of them were mentioned anywhere else in the game, but otherwise that final section fit much better than_Mischief’s_ “here, have a romance game tacked onto the end of your game.”
What else? I also appreciated that the image filesizes weren’t huge: the whole thing is, what, 8 or 9 MB? It’s always nice when I don’t have to waste download time and storage space on the non-text parts that I don’t care about.
Another lovely investigation; I had a good time.