Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus
Charles M Ball
Well, hmm. This was pretty competent, but somehow not very compelling? Like, there’s nothing particularly wrong with the craft here, given the genre: this is a ‘go on an adventure where your character fights bad guys and levels up’ game, and the premise is reasonable; the world is reasonable, the puzzles are… well. The fights are reasonable (if easy? I think?) but the puzzles seem to be ‘find the bit that triggers the next info dump’. These info dumps are several paragraphs long, in which the character you play is kind of a self-important jerk. Playing a jerk isn’t super interesting, as it doesn’t really go anywhere with it, nor does anyone call them out on it, or treat them better or worse because of it, or… or anything, really. They’re just jerky for no reason. And the triggers are kind of hidden, and often rely on doing a thing (usually ‘talking to someone’) only after some trigger has been hit. It’s a little jarring when the first time you >TALK TO DUDE the game says, “You don’t have anything to say to the dude,” and the next time you >TALK TO DUDE the game says, “Oh, right, now you have something to say, here’s three paragraphs of text.”
There’s also a bit of the ridiculous thrown in for good measure: this world’s version of casting attack spells at people is ‘rhyming’, so when you get attacked by Joe Thief, you intone, with great self-import: “Eeny meeny miny moe…” That… didn’t even get to the rhyme! It’s clearly supposed to be ridiculous/funny, but it hit a little weird for me, because it was the only bit of the whole game that had that brand of frivolity.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think part of the issue is that this is a parser game. In a Clicky, you’re always doing something followed by three paragraphs of text; that’s just the genre. In a parser game, I expect the text to be doled out more evenly with all the other messages you get, which are mostly short parser defaults and room descriptions. I dunno; maybe it’s just that the game didn’t grab me, and I’m grasping at straws to explain why, when the real reason is just a basic ‘this game wasn’t quite my speed’.
Did the author have anything to say? Some! There was an interesting world, and the protagonist was characterized, even if I didn’t like them much.
Did I have anything to do? Make tactical decisions when fighting (and when buying stuff), and otherwise stumble around looking for the next trigger.