Strings: a (bug)folk song
by Tabitha & baezil
I ended up having a yay-argh-yay relationship to this game, and it all came down to ‘not typing ABOUT’. The premise was delightful! I’m a bug-bard, getting a band together to call the last full moon of spring from the sky. You have a ‘bugdolin’! You touch stuff with your antennae! The dangers are things like a sparrow or a frog! Come on, you can’t help but be charmed by all this.
And then I got stuck (at the maze) and nothing I tried seemed to work. And I won’t belabor the whole sad tale (a Transcript is available if you’re a) the authors or b) morbidly curious), but it all boiled down to the fact that there were special verbs implemented that Did The Thing I Was Trying To Do, and because those verbs were there, neither the authors nor their testers thought to try other ways of phrasing Those Things. And I eventually discovered (thanks to an aside in Josh’s review of this game) that in the ABOUT text, you’re told there’s a COMMANDS option to list all the special verbs. Once I knew that, things were straightforward again! I could interact with the game as designed, and things flowed naturally. I eventually twigged to the central conceit of the piece (again, fairly telegraphed in COMMANDS, but somewhat opaque otherwise), and the rest of the game flowed smoothly.
Happily, there’s a very simple fix for this: just mention COMMANDS in the intro, instead of just the ABOUT! And emphasize that it’s critical for playing the game. And then the more complicated fix is to also implement responses for things I tried like >TURN PEG and >PLAY ONE STRING; even if it’s just telling the player what command to use instead.
On a personal note, having recently immersed myself in I7, it was actually kind of charming to find small bugs here and there and be able to comment >[‘LAST CHECK’ NOT ‘CHECK’], or, >[MOVE THE PLAYER AFTER THE CUT SCENE, NOT BEFORE]. I know what’s going on! I can help! Woo!
At any rate, by the end of the game, all was forgiven. I loved the setting, I loved the characters, I loved solving problems with music. I admit to a little bit of confusion about the >LORE, but nothing an ‘OK, sure, why not?’ couldn’t cure.
Did the author have anything to say? I may be tuned into this more in my current state of mind, having recently wrote a game where I very much had something to say about how life works, but I could feel the philosophy of the game seeping through the cracks, and I really appreciated it. It had to do with appreciating life, appreciating music, and the role of empathy in a life well lived. And the negative consequences of one of the two endings just delighted me in how they paled in comparison to the positive consequences, especially in a ‘folk tale’ like this. What does it matter if the very rhythms of all of nature are thrown in disarray? You got to spend time with your love, and it means you’ll have a new adventure to go on next to fix things again!
Did I have something to do? Be delighted, frustrated, and then delighted again. Solving the puzzles was quite satisfying, both in an ‘I know what to do!’ sense, but also in a ‘I get to read some cool text as a result!’ sense.