I’m doing the Great Play Marathon! Here are my reviews from my stops along the way:
- The Bones of Rosalinda (Agnieszka Trzaska)
3 Likes
The Bones of Rosalinda
Agnieszka Trzaska
So, taking a bit of a break from the Spring Thing games, I find myself playing… an old Spring Thing game! By an author whose game in this Spring Thing (The Universal Robot) I just played and enjoyed! With exactly the same interface! And a plucky protagonist going up against an unfairly powerful but rather dumb opponent! And a helpful cook NPC working for the villain!
Clearly, Agnieszka has found a winning formula (was ‘bones’ the first of that formula?) and is not shy about using it again. And good on her for that; I definitely enjoyed both. And the formula has clearly been refined over the years: the interface for combining items now takes one fewer click, as one example, and the look and feel of the new interface felt slicker. But everything is here and solid in this earlier iteration.
If the Universal Robot had a schtick, it was ‘multiple endings’. Here, the schtick is ‘your body parts are capable of independent actions’. Er… did I not mention the premise of the game? You’re a recently-animated skeleton, erroneously abandoned by your creator as a failure, and your task is to stop him from taking over the city. Along the way you meet a talking mouse, the aforementioned cook, and a petulant demon. And solve puzzles! Some of them are relatively standard ‘use X on Y’, but many of them make use of ‘send your arm off one direction or another’. Fun and satisfying to play.
Did the author have anything to say? Besides setting up a fun environment for puzzles, there was some actual human drama included as well, with characters overcoming fears and doing the Right Thing despite the risk and difficulty, and Working Together and Friendship, and, well, OK, it’s kind of standard, but it’s nice! It’s nice to have people struggling to do and then doing the right thing.
Did I have anything to do? Absolutely! The parser-like-world-model-except-in-twine is pretty robust, all things considered. I personally probably would have found the experience a bit smoother in a parser, but I understand wanting to make these games more accessible to a wider audience, and, fair enough!
11 Likes
I like those focusing questions for the review. Often I find myself playing a game, and thinking “does it do well what it set out to do?” but really the important follow-up question is “was what it set out to do worth doing?”
2 Likes