The Wise-Woman’s Dog
Daniel M. Stelzer
Aha! This was a fabulous game. Just lovely. I wrote the following in my transcript as I scoped out the beginning area: “This whole game is great; I would not be at all surprised if it wins. Wholesome, interesting, believable, cute. LOTS of attention to detail, and being helpful.”
There are two core mechanical premises: 1) you are a dog, and 2) you can move blessings and curses (spells) from one thing to another via yourself. That’s, like, almost a perfect premise for an IF game. You don’t have to have any conversations, because you can’t talk, and you give the player a fun and novel tool to manipulate the world with.
Then there’s the core setting premise: you are in the Absurdly Well Researched Anatolia, in 1280 BCE, in the late Hittite empire. There’s footnotes for days, each a bite-sized window into the author’s research into the time and region, with discussions about why they chose this bit instead of this other bit, or what was going on with the other thing.
Together, it all worked! At least it worked for me. I noodled around the opening area just thoroughly enjoying myself, finding new problems, finding new spells to solve those problems, watching recognizable people go about their normal lives in a very different world from my own that was nonetheless so grounded that I understood everything immediately.
The beginning is also super invested in making sure the player knows what to do and how to do it. But instead of getting an info-dump of ‘this is how IF works’, it’s parceled out over the first several moves, in a slightly over-enthusiastic way (for someone who already knows how IF works) but sincere and short enough that it wasn’t annoying.
The other nice thing was the gating: each ‘stage’ of the game had a common currency to collect, and once you got enough, you could go on to the next stage. But there was more currency available than you needed, so if any given puzzle was too hard for you, you could move on to the next stage anyway, then circle back if you just wanted the satisfaction of solving All The Puzzles. So in the end, you could accomplish the main goal of the game (‘save your human’) without having to be a completist.
Of course, I am a completist, so I had to solve all the puzzles. And while most of them were great, some of them I bounced off of, because, you know, they’re IF puzzles and this is a parser game and That’s What Happens. There was one puzzle in particular that was kind of frustrating to me (involving some, uh, hot oil) where I knew what I needed to do, but didn’t have the slightest idea of how to accomplish it. That one puzzle also kind of broke mimesis for me, because I was the only being that seemed to notice the problem? That seemed kind of major? And try as I might, I couldn’t manage to recruit anyone else to help. It also seemed like there was some sort of plot point in the setup to that disaster that was never resolved, although now that I type that out, I’m realizing there was probably a connection between the disaster trap and the robbery plot. But was there anything about the people behind those plots? Did I miss something? Anyway; it’s a minor point overall.
Slightly more concerning was the fact that by the late game, you have access to an absurd number of spells, which could feel a bit daunting at times. The biggest problem was probably just that there were enough that I could at times come up with a plausible-to-me use for a spell that the author wouldn’t have considered, meaning I would spend a lot of time transporting things all over the map, only to be met with a generic failure message at the end. I can’t overstress the importance of ‘working non-solutions’ to puzzles: you really owe it to your players to respond to things they try by acknowledging that they Tried A Thing, and ideally you’ll use that as an opportunity to push them the right way. That happened a reasonable amount of time for me in this game! But the combinatorial nature of spells and problems was so large that by the end, there was no way the author was going to be able to anticipate every last thing I did.
So being stymied and having to go to the hints was frustrating, but at least usually, the early hints would push me in the right direction, so I could end up feeling clever when I took the solution the rest of the way. And most of the puzzles were solvable for me in-game, which was even nicer. And, of course, I didn’t actually have to solve all the puzzles! If they were frustrating to me, I should have left them alone! But I liked the game too much to leave any stone unturned (or un-lifted or un-frozen, or un-locked, or…)
Did the author have anything to say? Absolutely! Just a ton. A vibrant world, a great premise, some fun characters, and some clever puzzles to solve.
Did I have anything to do? So much! I did so much stuff! I was the bestest dog, and when my human wakes up again, she is going to pet me a lot.