Ribald Bat Lady Plunder Quest (Joey Acrimonious)
This game was a deeply sincere, deeply ridiculous sex farce, and I cannot emphasize enough how well the sincerity blended with the ridiculousness to create something truly beautiful. Our protagonist, Zorklang, is the ribald bat lady foretold in the title, and not once in the entire game does she act out of character. She knows exactly who she is, she knows exactly what she wants, and she is absolutely relentless in her pursuit of her objectives. She has a character arc! Not the character arc where you start off thinking one thing, then the universe conspires against you to teach you a lesson, you learn the lesson, and use your newfound knowledge to overcome the final challenge. It’s the character arc where you start off awesome, the universe conspires against you to beat you down, and you respond by doubling down on your own awesomeness to rise up and overcome the final challenge. The emotional climax of the story finds our heroine bedraggled in the water, and the resolution was beautiful and heartwarming.
Not that the protagonist isn’t flawed. Her commitment to being in control is more than a little obsessive, and I worried for most of the game that her intended present was not going to be appreciated, as it didn’t really seem to me to be the sort of thing he would like. But this served for me to make Zorklang more real; more vibrant. And when her present was appreciated anyway at the end because it was from her, it made me cheer the happy couple even more.
That all this takes place in an over-the-top, sex-obsessed world, with a protagonist who is herself over-the-top and sex-obsessed was hilarious, due in no small part to the game taking this world completely seriously. Nothing that we-the-player find funny is funny at all to the inhabitants of the world: that’s just how the world works. The world is inherently ridiculous, and nobody knows this but us. So with every new ridiculous situation, with every new overly dramatic sex scene, with every new overwrought way of phrasing a simple description, there’s the initial surprise of the ridiculous, followed immediately by the realization that of course it had to be that way, that’s just How Things Work Here. It’s entirely character-based comedy, where one of the main characters is ‘the very universe’.
The game is not perfect. It needed some more beta testing, to smooth out some of the rougher edges, particularly ‘phrases the player will try that really should work’. Totally fixable. I was totally befuddled by the lack of room exits being listed in the descriptions until I finally realized that the room exits were listed in the status bar instead. (This will make it difficult to play on status-bar-less platforms like Floyd on ifMUD. Maybe an ‘exits’ command?) The ‘follow someone around’ puzzle can go on too long. Most generally, the game needs more gentle pushes for people who are on the wrong track to get them righted again. I highly recommend asking someone for hints if you get stuck–the hint page provided with the game will often help, but sometimes is spoil-y and sometimes not spoil-y enough.
A few of my favorite moments:
- The reason the assassin escapes the first time
- The ‘reward’ for helping a libidinous couple
- Any time modern slang crept into the faux-historical overwrought prose.
- The phrase ‘[The children] were in their beds, as foretold.’
- The subsequent story we tell
- The scene in the cistern
- The final scene. It was beautiful. (Also, ‘splint of sumptuous mahogany’.)
Did the author have something to say? Yes! A wonderfully constructed world, and a wonderfully constructed protagonist, with a plot where she stays true to herself to accomplish her goals.
Did I have something to do? Yes! The puzzles were a bit weaker than the other parts of the game, for me, but when they worked, they worked well, and I feel like even the ones that didn’t work for me could be made to work better with a little more polish. Amusingly, the game this most closely reminded me of was last year’s ‘The Princess of Vestria’ where one of my favorite things to do was ‘behave in genre-appropriate ways’. The same was true here, in a very very different genre!
EDIT: a link to my transcript.