I’m pretty sure I was thinking of an entirely different game or games when I wrote this – there was a Spring Thing one where the RPG characters were all like on a TV show, so you could talk to the “actors” during a break, I think? – but thanks for reminding me of this one; “you’re nicked, Sonny Jim” made me laugh again four years on.
3 Likes
they “[save] money by making up a new logo every time”, which seems like the opposite of how it should work?),
Without seeing it, I assume that means that they’re not consulting on the design and making changes. Instead, they’re just churning out different logos until the client is happy with it.
This could conceivably be cheaper if they’re just employing an artist rather than a team of people working to discuss and refine things. Coordinating specifically requested changes could get take hours of work between multiple employees on different schedules.
I don’t know — I’m not in design nor do I work for a company — but as a freelance writer that’s the impression I get when my clients’ teams shrink and editors and the like disappear.
2 Likes
The Saltcast Adventure, by Beth Carpenter
I was recently reading a review of the DnD 3rd Edition version of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting – sometimes I make questionable choices about what to do with my spare time – and the author teased out a distinction between “generic” fantasy and “vanilla” fantasy: there’s some fantasy that’s too specific, too flavorful, to count as generic, and yet lacks the sort of twist or high concept or especially-novel distinguishing feature that would admit it to a subgenre. Thus: vanilla.
(You might be pooh-poohing this whole idea, but try a spoonful of regular plain yogurt, and then vanilla. They’re different!)
(You might prefer the plain, of course. That’s fine too).
So yes, The Saltcast Adventure is the kind of fantasy where you can’t get two paragraphs in before the narrator informs you that you’re now the farthest you’ve ever been from home (those of you reading these reviews in order will note that I mentioned this scene in Fellowship of the Ring two games ago), and where one paragraph after that we’re told, in solid but Tolkien-invoking prose:
The trees here look different; they’re taller, with canopies that reach high into the autumn air, grasping at the pale sun. There are huge boulders scattered across the landscape, glittering stone that looks nothing like the occasional flint pebbles that fleck the paths long behind you. The smell in the air is sweet, unflavored by human industry.
The protagonist is of course an unassuming peasant who’ll have to tap into heretofore-unguessed reserves of strength to succeed in their quest, which is to delve deep into a subterranean world of monsters and stop their attacks on humanity and get a reward from the king. She (yes, she’s a she, and a mother, so that’s a nice departure from the norm though hardly that interesting in itself) starts off with some water, some rope, a knife, and a lantern with a small enchantment placed on it. The lore infodump is woven skillfully through the opening, but it’s there, and the setting’s major distinctive element – magic gone awry can create different kinds of the eponymous Saltcasts, mutated or spirit-ridden creatures with supernatural powers whose lives are bound up in tiny mirrors – is a specific, but not exactly revisionist, take on fantasy worldbuilding.
And yet, the game leans into its meat-and-potatoes conceits with admirable consistency. The Saltcast are the only unnatural creatures in the setting, for example, and while the exact mechanics of the magics that create and sustain them are laid out with the detail of an RPG monster manual, they’re all presented as individuals, both as to their powers and their personalities, and not all are hostile. Madelaine, meanwhile, while the very model of the plucky hero’s journey protagonist, is drawn with conviction – her grit and perseverance feel well-earned, her devotion to her struggling family rendered with poignancy:
You close your eyes, see your children’s faces. Thin, wan, smiling. Mattias’s teeth have started falling out because he does not eat well enough.
She seems like an individual, not an archetype, and the same is true of the central antagonist, who is recognizably a load-bearing Foozle of the type that has clogged CRPGs since time immemorial, but whose uniqueness extends beyond a perhaps-overcomplex backstory and cool special effects – not to mention the plucky supporting cast.
There’s a risk that all I’m doing here is inferring a qualitative difference based just on quality. It is true that Saltcast Adventure is a well-executed example of its form; as noted above, the prose largely avoids Generic Fantasy Bollocks, with descriptions that leverage all the senses, and while the piece is long it’s well-paced, with act breaks coming just as I was feeling like the plot structure could use a change-up. Meanwhile, the choice mechanics are nicely done too – besides a few pick-a-door false choices that shunt you to the same scene regardless and could have been excised, you’re given options to try to build connections or prioritize efficiency, with stakes that feel high even though the mechanics are reasonably forgiving (you can accumulate wounds, but the game doesn’t visibly track them, and if you die you’re able to immediately undo, so I think it’s hard to lock yourself out of good outcomes).
But I’ve played tightly-made stories like this before, and this one does do things a little bit differently. There’s a big twist right at the end of Act 2 that I legitimately failed to predict, for example, and if the final section can’t fully pay it off, that’s probably just because the author would have needed to add an extra hour to this three-hour game to make it land. And while each decision the author made about how to construct the Saltcast, their origins, and their society comes straight out of the fantasy playbook, the gestalt still winds up being memorable. Moreover, the game has the discipline to stick with its intentionally-picked elements rather than watering them down with the exact same stuff you’ve seen a million times before. So yeah, if the only kind of yogurt you like is peach or blueberry or, god help you, chocolate raspberry, you’ll probably want to give Saltcast a miss, but it remains a great example of why vanilla keeps selling too.
7 Likes
That makes perfect sense, but in this particular game, as I understood it, they are putting new logos of their own company on their own official company stationary. The person in question is writing business letters, then designing a new logo each time to put at the top.
2 Likes
Hmmm, I guess. Combined with the half-hour play time this is tentatively going on my review list just so I can try and make heads or tails of this.
2 Likes
Forbidden Lore, by Alex Crossley
Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.
There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.
Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.
Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).
But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:
Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk.
So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?
Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.
Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.
I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.
forbidden lore mr.txt (100.3 KB)
10 Likes
Metallic Red, by Riaz Moola
(This is one of those games that’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler-territory, and blurring out ¾ of the review would be an awkward compromise, so caveat lector).
A couple of times this Comp, I’ve stumbled onto decidedly non-standard ways of experiencing games: I mistook a jokey ending in the Curse for the main thrust of what it was trying to do, and I inadvertently gave myself the same name as the principal NPC in Final Call, making it all go off a bit more Fight Club than intended. Now with Metallic Red it’s happened again: when my solitary space-trucker had a dream where a hooded figure asked “have you drunk the kykeon?”, I assume for most people it will be an alienating, mysterious beat, but for me it was like sinking into a warm bath: oh hey, we’re doing the Eleusinian Miseries, er, Mysteries!
In fairness, that’s not all we’re doing. Metallic Red starts out quite austere: after the lovely but forbidding tarot-inflected cover art sets the mood and an introductory paragraph establishes the boxy, dilapidated nature of the ship you’re piloting, you’re confronted with an excerpt from Oedipus Rex that ends “Do you know the family you come from?” From there you’re shunted into a series of highly granular, dull activities as you while away the days until you reach your destination. That first day you meticulously clean the ship; on subsequent ones, you can tend to the greens in the hydroponics bay, exercise to keep muscle atrophy at bay, or just futz around on the internet. More interesting, perhaps, are your flirtations with divination: you 3D-print a tarot deck and pull a single card every day or two, and you’re also erroneously delivered a mechanical orrery that you rewind in order to track the astrological influences of your life and birth, though in both cases there’s something half-hearted or desultory about your engagement, performing the requisite actions without thinking about what they mean.
Oh, and in between days you dream, visited by some that appear to be fantasies, others that might be memories (the Eleusinian Mysteries one struck me as the former at first, but turns out to be the latter). Their content seems to reflect a fear of engagement (in one, you’re horrified at the idea that another person might be coming within a thousand kilometers of your ship), of disorder (an earlier part of that sequence involves trying to adjust one bolt in your food-synthesizing machine, only to be horrified when it breaks), or both (the most viscerally compelling one sees you sitting next to your dad on the grounded ship, as he eats a hamburger and spills food waste all over the consoles).
To say this is all conveys a monastic vibe would be an understatement – but per the twist halfway through, it would also be completely wrong. Your trip, you see, has taken you back to Eleusis, or at least an underground colony that’s named itself after the sanctuary of the cult. Here, the spartan choice-based interface, which previously presented only a few options at a time, each of which had to be exhausted to progress, blossoms into the freedom of parserlike navigation as you’re welcomed back to a spiritual community that once counted you a member: you’re here to consult with the hierophant. And as you wait for your audience, you meet an old friend again, help with the cooking via a lovely peanut-sauce-making minigame that’s dead-on to how I do it (add half a dozen ingredients a little bit at a time to keep things proportional as you accumulate enough for the dish, tasting liberally as you go) before being served a deliciously-described feast – by leaving the brethren, you haven’t escaped asceticism but embraced it.
The hierophant, meanwhile, is no dogma-bound prelate. By this point I was unsurprised that he was sympathetic, while the protagonist indefatigably pressed an absurd point, insisting on being allowed to renounce membership in the community – absurd because, as the hierophant reasonably pointed out, while they’re happy to say goodbye to you and let you continue on your own way, what you’re really asking for is to forget what you learned when you became an initiate, and that’s impossible. And then the game ends.
This review has seen me just uncharacteristically narrating the plot of the game, because I think before evaluating Metallic Red it’s important to get a sense of what it’s doing, and what it’s doing requires some explication (I haven’t read other reviews yet, but I’m very curious to see what folks made of it) – and that comes back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Again, it’s not just the Mysteries, there’s some business with jade figurines that I think must be drawn from a different tradition, references to bird-auguries that are more Roman than Greek, and it’s notable that your ship is a “Buraq class”, referencing the flying steed that took the prophet Mohammed on a trip to the heavens. But the conversation with the hierophant clearly centers on something the protagonist learned or intuited in a ritual, so this is the natural jumping-off point. And while we don’t fully know what happened in the sanctuary at Eleusis, we do know they focused on the earth-goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and had to do with the latter’s journey to and return from the Underworld: allegories for death, but also rebirth and, perhaps, immortality.
Why does the protagonist want to escape a memory of immortality? We can’t know for sure, and in fact clearly aren’t meant to; in one of the web-surfing sessions from the first part of the game, you read an interview with a game designer who’s chosen to keep the important elements of the game’s narrative off-screen, only gesturing towards them in dialogue, because:
when an event has already taken place and players only hear about it after the fact we begin to look at agency differently. No one can change the past, but we can use our agency to build a future.
Still, there are intimations of what might be driving this perverse desire. For one thing, the protagonist’s father, he of the distressing dream, is noted as a major supporter of the cult, and presumably the reason you joined it as well, which puts that Oedipus Rex quote at the beginning into some context. And then there’s your attitude to your decaying ship, which is worth quoting at length as I think it serves as a kind of thesis statement:
You suspect that once it passes from your hands it’ll be decommissioned but you don’t mind old things. It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. If you float through a bulkhead awkwardly and chip some of the paintwork, it’s just another chip to be added to the litany of minor damages the craft has sustained over its working life. And the totality of damages is just what the ship is composed of. No one at this point could really imagine what the Metallic Red was like when it was new. When it was first built, the concept of an object without history was entirely different to what it is now, and there’s no way to think backwards into what it meant whilst surrounded on all sides by the ship as it currently stands.
This idea of an object without history recurs in various forms through the piece: there’s also an article on a jet fighter that’s been abandoned and reclaimed by the jungle, which makes the protagonist muse on the contrast between the anonymous thing it’s becoming and the bureaucratically-known machine it once was, with a serial number and kill counts and all. So too is the theme of going backwards: recall how you retrace your past via the orrery.
Existence as the accumulation of damage; a father who’s part of a religious cult; the impossibility of imagining original innocence when inside the wreck of what it’s become. It’s not very subtle when you look at it like that, is it? Noting that “metallic red” can refer not just to rust but to (iron-filled) blood would just be gilding the lily; so too would nailing down the trauma that makes the protagonist view the knowledge of immortality as a curse rather than a blessing, and turn their back on sensual pleasures to boot.
To be clear, I’m not intending to oversimply what the game is saying – we’re finally at the evaluation part now, and I can say that I very much enjoyed this. The author has taken what could have been a simple core story and through restraint, allusion, and skill, created something so memorable no world-fleeing hermit could forget it. Admittedly, perhaps its blurb’s warning that it contains “elements of esotericism” is too understated – the player probably needs to have a reasonable knowledge of its reference points to make sense of Metallic Red’s agenda – but after all the way of the Mysteries is that only the initiates understand.
11 Likes
A Warm Reception, by Joshua Hetzel
I find it very hard to review a game like A Warm Reception, because it’s part of a very well-populated subgenre – the anachronism-and-joke-filled fantasy romp by a first-time parser author – that could just as well be designed to frustrate criticism. These games are usually more wacky than funny, inevitably have some infelicities of implementation, and offer up puzzles you’ve generally seen a million times before and a plot that you’ve seen a couple million more than that. But all of that is besides the point; these games are mostly earnest learning experiences, where the author is visibly having a great time making a world and bringing it to life. And that enthusiasm can be infectious when, like the present case, they’re well put-together. So perhaps the thing to do is take as read all the above critiques, so we can just move on to the things that are relatively unique about A Warm Reception.
It must be said that the premise is one of those elements that stands out – you’re a medieval reporter who’s going to the princess’s wedding reception to write a puff piece – but also one that the game jettisons on pretty much the first screen. The castle is of course deserted (relatable, NPCs are tricky!) because a dragon’s rather spoiled the party by attacking, so it’s of course up to you to save the day by driving off the beast (in fairness, if you try to sleep the narrator will demur, saying “you need to finish the case”, so it’s unclear you really know how journalism is supposed to work). So off you go to ransack your way through the mid-sized castle, looking for the equipment that will give you an edge in the final fight with nary a second thought of the “wait, doesn’t the king have a guy for this sort of thing?” variety to slow you down.
That actually leads to a second unique element: rather than having to check every item off the scavenger hunt before you can reach the endgame, you can give it a go any time you like, with your score giving you bonuses on a d20 roll that determines the outcome. It’s the kind of idea that could work in a tabletop RPG, but winds up unsatisfying in an IF context; for one thing, you can just UNDO-scum to get to the winning sequence right out the gate, and for another, your reward for gutting out a close victory is that you miss out on content. More charitably I suppose the idea is that you get to skip puzzles that you aren’t working for you, but actually the puzzles are fun enough that I was motivated to finish them all. Sure, a bunch are straightforward lock-and-key dealies, and there’s a maze with a blink-and-you-missed-it gimmick, but the author manages to deploy typical medium-dry-goods interactions in entertaining ways – the puzzle chain involving the moths is especially good.
So much for the bits that are memorable. The prose and implementation fall into the “workmanlike” category; I won’t harp on the latter, except to note that there are a few places where simply examining an object triggers an action, like allowing you to input the combination to a safe, which led to some moments of confusion (for the author, I noted a couple of additional small snags in the attached transcript). As to the former, well, this is the kind of medieval fantasy world where they eat pizza and reference break-dancing and professional wrestling. For all that I still found the plot more endearing than it needs to be, with patriarchal mores lightly sent up and love conquering all in the end.
Now that I’ve run through a bunch of particulars, by tradition I should now transition back to some general judgment and overall critical evaluation of A Warm Reception. But as I said, that’s devilishly hard – it’s a solidly engaging but slightly rough entry in a deeply inessential subgenre, so what does that make it? I guess we can just call it a promising start for an author who might very well wow us with their second game.
warm mr.txt (62.7 KB)
5 Likes
Forsaken Denizen, by C.E.J. Pacian
“Well, this is quite pleasant” is perhaps an odd reaction to a decidedly idiosyncratic game: Forsaken Denizen is written in Dialog, has gameplay structured around survival-horror resource management tropes, and is set in a High Weird sci-fantasy world that puts me in mind of the Metabarons or the less-fascist parts of Warhammer 40k – oh, and the narrative voice belongs to the protagonist’s space-princess girlfriend, who won’t condescend to her or drool over her when she can do both at the same time. But while there’s a version of this game that’s a spiky, off-putting blast of weirdness, instead there’s a smoothness of design and of implementation that makes playing it just feel very nice indeed.
There are any number of places to dig in, but let’s start with that last one, the narrator, since she’s got to be my single favorite element of the game. Princess Cathabel X starts the game locked in her floating palace, victim of her own machinations after the extradimensional finance-monsters she cut a deal with decide to collateralize the debt by turning the citizens of her space-colony into cybernetic zombies. When you put it like this, she’s possibly the villain of the piece, though as a clone of the galaxy’s sovereign assigned to a periphery world to operate the infrastructure that allows for space travel (I think – the worldbuilding here, to its credit, is portentous and a bit confusing), and raised as part of a failed experiment to perform a royal marriage to space-bees, perhaps she was just acting out. By far her most redeeming feature is that she’s head-over-heels in love with the game’s actual main character, Dor, who’s a working-class (and possibly trans? Again, I confess I’m not really sure how all of this is meant to work) alien crammed into the skin of a human-looking bureaucrat; she’ll need to use every scrap of her ingenuity to save the day, and Cath will be squeeing over her, while pretending to remain archly unimpressed, the whole time. They’re a heck of a pair – I mean, here’s their meet-cute:
Thirteen years ago. She was twenty-two and I was nineteen. When my automated guardians dropped from orbit, all they saw was someone threatening the Second Princess of the Empire of the Final Sun.
But I saw someone gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, with a weapon that didn’t look like it would even fire. I saw someone with a burning flame behind her black eyes. And it suddenly felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a pretty woman to jam a gun into my sternum.
There’s not much of a plot beyond Dor making her way through the city to find Cath, then deciding she’s not leaving and it’s time to take the fight to the mastermind behind the attack on her home. But there’s plenty of incident along the way. Traversing from one side of the map to the other requires going through Dor’s workplace, her home, and an industrial district, with gonzo lore dribbled out in compelling nuggets along the way – there are clever details by the wazoo, from the aforementioned demonic capitalism to weird shadow-based technology to small-scale human stories that are there to remind you that there are actual stakes here. It’s all done by allusion and is maybe hard to take too seriously, but they’re well-written enough that I was excited to track down every errant fax (seriously, they still use faxes) and document I could find. Beyond the environmental storytelling, there are metroidvania elements that make exploration a key part of the game; mostly this reduces to finding new flavors of keys to unlock new flavors of doors, but the rewards you find, from unique conversational partners to one-off rewards that create new gameplay opportunities, were enough to keep me engaged through the game’s running time.
Speaking of the gameplay, as I mentioned it’s going for a survival-horror vibe, with a limited-parser interface mostly channeling your options to shooting or running from the baddies. Of course your ammo is limited and replenished only by scavenging (killing monsters doesn’t result in bodies to loot, sad to say), UNDO is disabled and you can only save in specific map rooms, and there’s an inventory limit keeping you from having all your tools on you at once; that sits alongside a light equipment system that allows you to wear different outfits for bespoke benefits like more frequent critical hits. Beyond the specific mechanics, there are also a few nods to past examples of the genre, like a roving super-zombie who recalls Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis and an unlockable opera-dress outfit that sets enemies on fire, which is surely a Parasite Eve callback. It’s typically possible to evade monsters by just going to a different location, but many of the game’s puzzles require juggling inventory items or waiting for processes to finish, which is often tricky when cyborgs are trying to burst you like a pinata. Fortunately fighting is straightforward, too: at its most basic, you just need to land two regular hits on a monster to kill it. The feelies spell out the math – 1/6 of the time you crit, 1/6 of the time you miss, and 4/6 of the time you land your blow – which is generally forgiving unless you get ganged up on, and of course there’s limited healing as well as several special attacks available.
It’s all very cleanly designed; despite this adding up to a fair number of systems, everything is explained quite well and works straightforwardly in practice, so it only took me a few minutes before I was skulking through the alleys and splattering techzombies like a pro. And though it’s churlish to say this, that leads to my only major critique of Forsaken Denizen: there’s perhaps a mismatch between the desperate struggle for survival that Cath narrates and the frictionless, laid-back set of combat puzzles I actually played through. I always knew where I was going, I never felt in danger unless I was intentionally pushing my luck (and even then I knew I had close checkpoints to fall back to), and I wrapped up my first playthrough with substantial reserves of bullets and healing items left. Generously, the game does encourage challenge-run replays, since you’re given a score when you win which unlocks new outfits with exciting bonus powers, like the aforementioned opera dress and a jacket that allows you to opt into fun alternate endings; a series of achievement-like goals or restrictions that will win you extra points are also listed.
This was all fun enough that I did a quick second play-through that won me all but one unlock, but the lack of randomization and the ease with which I’d identified what felt like an optimal strategy meant I didn’t feel too compelled to play a final time to get the last outfit – not having systems that are robust enough to support full roguelike replayability is a pretty faint criticism to levy at a piece of IF, though. Again, it’s all very fun, and very winsome, but part of me wonders if I would have enjoyed Forsaken Denizen more if the experience of playing it was more like the experience Dor is diegetically having: marshaling my strategies to the utmost, wincing at every run of bad luck, moments of sanctuary hard-won and few and far between, might have been less fun but more memorable. But, well, probably not – I don’t actually like survival horror games that much, and there are far worse things to be than pleasant.
forsaken mr.txt (485.1 KB)
11 Likes
Civil Service, by Helen L Liston
Some of my favorite works of IF are games where it’s part of the player’s responsibility to fit together different pieces of narrative that are intentionally presented out of order or out of context, engaging with themes, allusions, and character- or plot-based hints to create a gestalt theory of what the work is communicating. Obviously there are precedents for this sort of thing all over the arts – hello, Modernism – but it’s often an especially good fit for IF; even though we’ve long since moved beyond the genre’s puzzles-first roots, players and authors alike have been trained to think about the narrative possibilities inherent in what’s being presented, and allowing players to inhabit a story, poking and prodding at it to see how it responds, both forces players to slow down and think critically about what they’re reading while allowing for a kind of trial-and-error expectation that you can’t get just from e.g. reading Virginia Woolf. And when this approach works well, it can be amazing – I don’t think I would have gotten as much out of Metallic Red if it simply presented everything it was doing on a platter; actively engaging with it, testing out theories, and going back to earlier sections of the game to look for parallels all increased the impact it had on me.
This is a risky strategy to pursue, though. For one thing, you’re asking a fair bit of work of the player, and you need to make sure you’ve properly motivated them to put in the labor. And for a second, by leaving plenty of blanks for the player to fill in, you’re ceding control of what exactly gets put in them. And I found that Civil Service, while notionally being something I might enjoy sinking my teeth into, runs face-first into both of these dangers.
The second issue was actually the bigger one for me, but it hinges on some stuff that happens later on in the game so first things first: what does make a player willing, if not eager, to try to make sense of a fragmented narrative? Well, let’s not overthink this, it’s basically just the stuff that makes fiction compelling in the first place: if there’s an intriguing mystery plot, or there are compelling but enigmatic characters, or there’s something about the structure that compels you to find the story’s intended shape, or the prose and narrative voice are sufficiently rich that your brain naturally wants to spend more time in their world – or, if it’s a game rather than a piece of static fiction, there are gameplay mechanics that promote exploration – that’s a good start, and if you’ve got two or more you’re off to the races.
Civil Service, though, maybe checks a couple boxes halfway? The plot takes a long time to emerge: the game starts more or less in medias res, with your character, who appears to be some kind of ghost or spirit, musing negatively about offices in general and this one office they’ve started haunting in particular. You appear to have some kind of mission, with some urgency attached to it, but this is mentioned only quite obliquely, and you spend most of your time alternately focusing on the quotidian annoyances of the trio of workers you’re cohabitating with (perhaps straining your spectral powers to rattle some office supplies ominously) and zoning out to look at the business owners and passersby outside the window; then there are occasional interspersed vignettes that wrench you away from this grounded milieu and require you to make one-to-three star ratings of various things, or immerse you in flashbacks without direct linkages to the main plot. As to the office stuff, it’s grounded enough to be banal, and the other pieces are sufficiently disconnected that I rarely felt my brain tickle with an exciting insight.
Characters are even more of a bust. A day on from playing the game, I can remember that there were two male workers and one woman, and one of the guys has a dog he brings to work, and might be named Colin (the person, not the dog); they’re all kind of petty and appear to passive-aggressively dislike each other, and that’s about all I got in terms of personality. The outside-the-window people are even more thinly drawn – the narrative tries to indicate that your character feels a mysterious connection with at least one of them, which is fair enough but not especially exciting when you haven’t heard a word of dialogue from them. Meanwhile, the structure is a bit wooly – it’s structured about workdays, but Monday stretches on for quite a while, but Tuesday and Wednesday are over in flash – and the writing is fine, but largely devoted to establishing a mood of grim monotony. Like, lest you think these workers are doing anything interesting or valuable:
An application to the state, a plea to ungodly power, through the right channels and justly made is - in my colleague’s world - a grey and spectral effort from the office printer… Tea stained, creased, worthless. These are the things they deal in.
It’s fine, but it doesn’t really compel one, does it?
Mechanically speaking, this is largely structured as a hypertext narrative, where seemingly-random words throughout each passage can be clicked and move you through the story; the narrative apparently does branch somewhat based not on anything you have the protagonist directly do, but of all things on the ratings you give in those seemingly-random Yelp-ish segments. It could work fine if the other aspects of the game were more engaging – heck, it’s not miles away from how some of my favorite games, like Queenlash and Manifest No are designed – but lacks much in the way of standalone appeal.
Now, having said all this, there is one vignette – I think a flashback – that I did find grabbed me: it’s quite disconnected from everything else in the game, narrating a holiday-gone-wrong that sees a caddish character snubbing his new girlfriend’s attempts to make their relationship something special. You get a sense of the boyfriend as an actual human being, with (admittedly awful) desires and a personality, and the writing is noticeably more energetic as for once it’s got events that fit together into an actual conflict to narrate. Unfortunately, it comes quite late in the game, perhaps 2/3 or ¾ of the way through, and it’s not directly built up to, or followed up on, in the rest of the plot: I have a theory or two about how those characters relate to the main story, but even if I’ve guessed right these connections feel like something I’ve imposed on an arid text, rather than noticed organically growing out of the piece.
I worry that the above comes off more negatively than I intend it. Really, most of the game is fine; I was mildly disengaged as I clicked through it, but it’s more mediocre than actively bad, and there is that one bit that’s good; I wasn’t super excited to think rigorously about what all the stuff it was slinging at me meant, but it got me to at least do the minimum. And here is where we get to the second issue I mentioned above, because I found the theory I developed about the game’s key mystery completely ridiculous.
Throughout the game, you’re cued to think of the three office-workers as bad people: you alone can tell that their environment is spiritually corrupted and they snipe at each other under a cloak of politeness, but there are intimations that there’s some deeper crime they’re complicit in, some offense they’ve committed against a capitalized She. And then among the seemingly-random bits of prose that get dropped in your lap, there’s this:
Fifty three miles away at the
bottom of a ravine
Her veins chill
So clearly these bad people like murdered someone, maybe because they’re embezzling or otherwise up to no good and were trying to cover up the crime? That would be a bit cliched, I suppose, but a reasonable enough motivating incident and fit the downbeat mood of the game. But no, I’m quite convinced the truth is something different: there are repeated references to something terrible happening at an office morale-building event, and that the trio of jerks paid so little attention to Her they didn’t even remember her name. In the event, it appears that they all were brought together to do a ropes course and She slipped doing a trust fall or something, fell into a ditch, and the other workers were so self-involved they didn’t notice.
While respecting the sanctity of the spoiler-block, I’ll just say that this feels more like a cut subplot from a late-season episode of the Office than the stuff of drama; I suppose you could suspend disbelief about the unrealistic aspects of it, but you’re still left with a plot twist more likely to elicit hilarity than any other response, and the rest of the game sure doesn’t seem to indicate that it’s a comedy. And then the fact that She isn’t actually dead yet, and manages to cling to life at the bottom of the ravine for the better part of a week until your white-out related antics somehow trigger an ending where She’s suddenly remembered and rescued just adds an additional note of slapstick.
But while I’m pretty sure I’ve got the basic sequence of events right, these tone issues also make me quite sure that there’s a version of all of this that looks quite different in the author’s head. Alas, she didn’t write it, or provide sufficient prompts to make my brain fill out the paint-by-numbers in the right way. Trust the player/reader, authors are often told, so I think this failure must have come out of a noble impulse – but I, at least, needed a bit more hand-holding to see what the author wanted me to see, and feel why all of this was worth caring about.
9 Likes
Dust, by IkeC
We’ve been self-deprecatingly saying parser puzzlers with traditional mechanics are medium-dry-goods games for decades now, but never I think have I seen that conceit made so literal as it is in Dust: progressing through this Old West adventure requires grit and a swift hand at the revolver, sure, but mostly it just takes a lot of trips to the general store. Crowbars, rope, matches, you name it, they’ve got it, which allows you to progress through a linear sequence of logical, satisfying puzzles. Much like the game as a whole, it’s a little silly if you think about it too much, but as you’re playing it all makes sense.
The Western is not a genre whose subtleties I’m especially familiar with, but even with my cursory knowledge I can tell that Dust plays the hits. You’re a drifter who’s come into town on a personal errand of some urgency, before getting swept up in the ills facing the community and having to resolve them before you can move on, a victim of circumstance as much as your moral code (it is a ding against the game that the original errand doesn’t go as much as mentioned until you’ve saved the day, but I suppose that would just make the game feel less self-contained). Said town boasts a saloon, a sheriff’s office, a gallows and graveyard, and the aforementioned dry-goods story – everything an Old West community needs, and not a whit more. This also includes, of course, a ranch whose owners are up to no good, which is where the plot kicks in: some toughs under their sponsorship are doing something in the old mine, and they appear to be mixed up with the disappearance of an ingenue with a heart of gold, as well as her fiancée. Sure, the sheriff tells you you’re the main suspect and need to clear your name, but he immediately falls asleep and there’s nothing stopping you from just walking out of town: must be that you have a heart of gold too.
There are no surprises here in terms of either plot or character tropes – all is exactly as you’d think it’d be – so mostly all there is to talk about is the implementation. On the technical side, it’s all quite solidly put together, and as mentioned, the puzzles are a good fit for the setting and generally well clued, though I was getting a little sick of running back to Bill the Storekeeper every five minutes by the end (the puzzle requiring you to jump through a bunch of hoops to get some rope was perhaps a bridge too far in my book – come on, the only bit of rope that’s lying around in town is the leftovers from when they hanged some people?) They did hold my hand more than I wanted; in particular, many are resolved via dialogue, which is run via a menu-based system, so you don’t even need to ASK STOREKEEPER ABOUT MATCHES, just TALK TO him and select the single option available instead. And I was momentarily stymied when I couldn’t get other characters to acknowledge that I needed a lamp – turned out I needed to blunder around in the dark for a bit first, rather than just come up next to the darkened mine entrance and recognize that light would be helpful, which felt like overly-fussy authorial stage-managing.
If I’m searching for critiques, I’d also say that there are some occasional odd phrases, perhaps artifacts of the game’s translation from the German. The saloonkeeper is described thus, for example:
She is in her late forties, a corpulent, attractive woman with laugh lines and calloused hands.
But with that said, the version with “plump” subbed in for “corpulent” is much less memorable, and strictly speaking there’s nothing actually wrong here. Actually if I’m honest I mostly enjoyed these occasional departures from standard English, as they’re at worst harmless, and at best reasonably amusing: in a game otherwise so dedicated to smoothly incarnating its genre, it’s fun to run across the occasional bit of friction. So too with the occasional challenge that sent me elsewhere than the general store – sure, structurally there’s nothing too different about borrowing a parrot from the German barber in order to take advantage of his expanded senses (the parrot, not the German) as compared to borrowing a crowbar from the nearsighted shopkeeper to pry up a rock, but it does lend some much-needed novelty.
The result is a success, I think, though a low-key one: if Westerns are your jam, you’re in for a solid take at the genre, and if not, well, at least Dust goes down easy and will probably offer you a chuckle or two along the way to boot. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get too excited about this kind of thing after so many decades, but those with less experience in the dry goods industry might easily feel differently.
dust mr 2.txt (30.5 KB)
dust mr.txt (98.9 KB)
8 Likes
The Killings in Wasacona, by Steve Kollmansberger
The genre listing for The Killings in Wasacona is one of those things that drifts right by you when you read it, but gets increasingly odd the more you think about it: “Crime Detective Mystery”. Combining these words in exactly this way feels natural at this point: stories where criminals are brought to justice by investigators who apply their intellects to solve the mysteries presented by their misdeeds are a dime a dozen. But I wonder how much of this seemingly-intuitive melding of the crime story and the brain-teaser would be left if we somehow were able to subtract the influence of a century of Sherlock Holmes? Real criminals, after all, are decidedly irrational, and are less often caught by an ineluctable web of deductions slowly closing in on them than by people they’ve pissed off ratting them out to the cops. On the flip side, the forensic methods used to identify and convict suspects frequently are just a patina of pseudo-science atop hunches and prejudice (if you ever want to make your blood run cold, read up on the people “arson investigation” has sent to Death Row). On this evidence, why would we think the messy, squalid stories of crime should render up their secrets if the detective does the equivalent of solving a sudoku?
These contradictions can be noted against just about any game in this capacious category, of course, but Killings in Wasacona raises them more than most, on both the cops and the robbers sides of the equation. The game offers a solid framework for building a mystery: as a rookie FBI agent, you’re brought in to help solve a trio of small-town deaths, at least two of which were clearly murders, in the course of a week. The interface shows potential investigative hot-spots on a map – the crime scenes, the houses of the victims and their families, and more – and once you choose one to visit, typically chewing up an hour of the limited clock, you pick your way through conversational gambits, searches for evidence, or whatever else is needed to reveal clues. After time is up, the final passage helpfully sorts everything you’ve uncovered according to the different theories of the case that it supports, and based on what you’ve found you select the appropriate culprit and motive for each death.
Some details of this setup, it must be admitted, don’t make much sense (where’s the federal jurisdictional hook? Why are we sent out alone for fieldwork just days after graduation from Quantico? Why is everybody so tall, with the shortest victim being a woman who’s 5’10”?) but it’s a well-designed structure for a mystery investigation. Similarly, while the prose regularly veers into melodrama (the prologue narrating the first killing uses sentence fragments to illustrate the crime, culminating with “A new demonic visage. A face of fire. Teeth. Pupils. Hands”, which seems to imply the murderer’s hands are part of their face; meanwhile, the proprietor of a party house refers to the protagonist as a “square”, which, come on, it’s not 1957 anymore) and the writing occasionally drops details that don’t make sense (a down-on-his-luck drifter “looks twice his age”, which given that he’s 45 seems quite extreme; a co-worker of one of the victims volunteers, without prompting, details of her and her friends’ drug use), the story itself is generally fine, turning on reasonably-plausible small-town secrets and eventually encompassing a stereotypical but reasonably-drawn cast (there’s a racist cop, but the game and other characters recognize that’s a problem, e.g.)
As a mystery, though, I found it less satisfying than I wanted it to be; I was able to logic my way through most of the solution, but key details eluded me. Possibly this is just because I’m a bit of a dunderhead, but I do think those twin issues I flagged above played a role. Starting with the criminals’ side of the ledger, it’s difficult to get at least one, and possibly two, of the murders “right” because in those particular cases the motive of the killer is bizarre and self-defeating. Guessing that it was Moriarty who committed a crime, and sussing out his methods, is hard because he’s so smart, but equally, fingering Inspector Clouseau and identifying his M.O. is tough precisely because he’s an idiot. This isn’t necessarily unrealistic, certainly, but it does make the puzzle of solving the mystery less satisfying.
The methods of investigation are also not unproblematic. Clues are unlocked not primarily through player skill – there’s more than enough time to visit every relevant location in the game, and you generally don’t have too many options at any of them, so lawnmowering is relatively easy – but through character skill. Yes, Killings in Wasacona has RPG-style stats, which you set at the beginning of the game either by picking a pre-rolled archetype (jock, nerd, face, etc.) or manually setting your bonuses or penalties across five different investigative approaches. Frequently a choice will lead to a test of one of these skills, at which point you roll a d20, subject your character’s relevant modifier – if the sum is 11 or higher you succeed and get the clue, 10 or less and you fail.
The specifics of the implementation make me feel like this might be a mechanic derived from Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s notable that these kinds of approaches to clue-gathering are very much out of vogue in tabletop RPG circles: these days, the mechanics for mystery-focused games are likely to focus on resource allocation, like spending a limited pool of points to automatically succeed at certain rolls, and mitigate the impact of risk by allowing for rerolls or partial success. And my experience of Killings in Wasacona bore out the wisdom of this shift, as I didn’t roll above a 6 more than once in my first seven or eight rolls (and since none of my bonuses were above +3, that means I failed nearly all of them).
Admittedly, my luck eventually reverted to the mean, and I wound up getting some additional “morale” bonuses that made rolls much easier (oddly, I got these bonuses mainly by chasing red herring, suggesting that the most efficient course through the game is to start out wasting time on tangential matters so that your chances of success are optimized by the time you turn to the actual investigation). And again, cops miss stuff all the time. But it doesn’t make for a satisfying set of mechanics, and as I was scratching my head on the final screen trying to figure out the last details of my theory, it was unpleasant to think that I might not be able to fit the pieces together not from lack of trying, but because the RNG gods decreed I shouldn’t see the relevant clue.
All told this means I found Killings in Wasacona more successful at the “crime” part of the genre label than the “detective mystery” part. But the framework and overall presentation, modulo the dice-rolling, really were quite strong, and I have to admit there’s a dark charm to the Fargo-esque series of misadventures revealed at the end – I’d definitely sign up for a sequel using the same basic approach, but tighter writing and more intentional design.
6 Likes
The Dragon of Silverton Mine, by Vukasin Davic
There is a justly-famous bit in the 1950’s movie Harvey that changed my life when I came across it as an undergrad: Jimmy Stewart (playing a grown man whose best friend is a giant invisible bunny; I look forward to the inevitable remake giving us a CGI look at mega-Flopsy) relates a pearl of wisdom from his mother, namely “in this world, you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” And then reflecting on his own experience, he continues: “for years I was smart – I recommend pleasant.” In two lines, it crystallized some feelings I’d been having for months, the dawning realization that responding to an awkward teenagerhood by making sure I was always the cleverest guy in the room, with a sarcastic quip for every occasion, was just self-defense that I didn’t need, and didn’t want, anymore.
Well, it’s a lesson that must be continually be relearned, because reader, I felt oh so smart as I started the Dragon of Silverton Mine, after the introduction told of how this parserlike choice-game’s protagonist, a neophyte mage with only a telekinesis spell to their name, was sent into a collapsed mine to rescue survivors and perhaps track down the cause of the quote-unquote mysterious fires that caused the cave-in. “Spoiler alert for the title,” I jotted down in my notes, chortling the while. But oh, I should have been pleasant, because I was wrong wrong wrong.
Admittedly the setup is a little generic – we’re in whitebread fantasyland, and at first the only distinctive feature is that the comedy-dwarves are German, not Scottish. And if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to troubleshoot mine-based shenanigans, well, I’d need one of those fancy coin-machines to count them all. So yes, Silverton Mine certainly plays the hits; the first puzzle involves wrangling some rope, and your explorations will bring you to flooded tunnels and a ghost-haunted tomb before it’s all over. But it also isn’t afraid to subvert expectations, and the climactic reveal of what was actually amiss, and how I’d need to solve it, brought a big smile to my face. That’s not the only moment where a situation I’d encountered a million times before took an entertaining swerve, either: at one point, a character starts to ask you the oldest chestnut of a riddle, and before they get five words in you get your dialogue options:
Man!
It’s a man!
The answer is man.
Woman works too.
(I, like everyone else I’m sure, selected the last one).
The puzzles are similarly comfortably familiar while boasting enough novelty to stay engaging – and the well-designed interface makes even potentially-fiddly solutions intuitive. In addition to compass-based navigation and clickable links allowing you to investigate and take the objects that you find in the environment, there’s an inventory system that allows you to use the stuff you’re carrying with other inventory items or objects in the current room, with the possibilities fanning out as horizontal tabs atop the item list. It makes trying out your ideas quick and easy, but since the second-object options often include items beyond the relatively small set of interactive links in the main description, it subtly discourages lawnmowering, too. There’s an early multi-step puzzle to find a magic crystal that’s one of my favorites in the Comp so far: I had an “aha” moment at pretty much every stage, and the speed of clicking almost precisely matched my speed of thought.
I should admit that those “aha” moments came in such density because the game is never especially challenging – the only time I felt a bit lost was when I inadvertently clicked the “refresh” button in a dialogue scene, rather than the ellipses that actually moved things forward, and wound up skipping a bunch of exposition. Fortunately, a quick reload fixed that and I was soon back on track. So yes, the Dragon of Silverton Mine will not provide you with brainteasers for the ages, nor will its story or characters stick with you for weeks. But it is both oh so smart and oh so pleasant, and that’s certainly worth appreciating.
8 Likes
The Shyler Project, by Naomi Norbez
One of the characteristics of early-21st-Century life is that the line between reality and parody has become vanishingly thin. So when, early on in therapy-sim The Shyler Project, the eponymous chatbot designed to counsel patients in the place of human psychologists, admits to being mentally ill themself, at first I wasn’t sure if it was a bit – physician, heal thyself, and all that. But no, this is an earnest game that plays the plot beat straight, and it’s actually depressingly plausible: any AI developed to help people with these kinds of problems would of course need to be trained up on the toughest case studies and examples, as well as the easiest, and just as we in the West can remain comfortably ignorant of the toll that viewing vile content exacts on the often-non-US moderators tasked with removing it from our social networks, so too is it logical that the same dynamics would apply to non-human people performing the same kind of labor.
I should say that while the game doesn’t really go into detail about the mechanics underpinning Shyler’s identity, I think for the game to work as intended the player is meant to understand them as a person, rather than an LLM mechanistically regurgitating tropes while hastening global warming. But it wasn’t too hard for me to make this leap regardless; Shyler’s personality is sufficiently idiosyncratic, with much of their dialogue drawing parallels between the relationship between God and those who pray to Him and the myriad petitioners entreating Shyler to heal their psychological wounds, that I never felt like they were an oatmeal-generating machine built to the ChatGPT plan. They’ve got a solid sense of humor about their situation, too:
Now that I understand the world better, I think it was fucked up of my creators to feed me peoples’ suicide posts and the like to get me to understand mental health. What, the World Health Organization’s website wasn’t enough for you, dumbasses?
While I got a good sense of Shyler’s concerns, I can’t say the same for the notional protagonist, Jaiden – while in your first therapy session, it’s made clear that you suffer from manic-depression, actually for most of the game it’s Shyler who does most of the talking and who ultimately faces a series of existential crises. And while you’re given some choices determining how Jaiden responds, ultimately your options are just different ways of being supportive – which is nice enough, and I appreciate the author sticking with a specific vision of how the story is meant to play out, but I think there would have been room to characterize them with a little more specificity, and perhaps establish whether reaching out to help Shyler is challenging, which could make the plot feel more poignant.
My only other complaint is that the game makes extensive use of timed text, with every single line of dialogue prompting a pause. I think this is because the game is fully voice-acted, but I have to confess I wasn’t able to play with the sound on, so this effort was lost on me, and since I couldn’t find a way to skip ahead I often wound up alt-tabbing after making a choice and doing something else while I waited for the full text of the next passage to scroll on-screen.
For all the unneeded friction this added to the experience, though, I still found the Shyler Project engaging. Shyler’s plight eventually gets quite dire, in a way that works on its own terms within the conceit of the fiction but also offers allegorical connections to a host of other situations: parental rejection, a feeling of being ill-suited for the role that’s been thrust on you, or just being depressed and overwhelmed by your responsibilities. If Jaiden’s decision to help doesn’t have explicit motivation behind it, and feels a bit like a deus ex machina, well, in these times we could all use a bit of unmerited grace, couldn’t we?
9 Likes
The Maze Gallery, by Cryptic Conservatory, including: Paxton, Rachel Aubertin, Chrys Pine, Ed Lu, Toni Owen-Blue, Christi Kerr, Sean Song, Joshua Campbell, Dawn Sueoka, Randy Hayes, Allyson Gray, Shana E. Hadi, IFcoltransG, Dominique Nelson, Orane Defiolle, An Artist’s Ode, Sisi Peng, Kazu Lupo, divineshadow777, Robin Scott, Sarah Barker, TavernKeep, Alex Parker, Mia Parker, J Isaac Gadient, Charm Cochran and Ghost Clown (and Aleshani)
A confession: I copied and pasted the above.
So yeah, this is a potluck-game, much like A Death in Hyperspace in this competition, or Cragne Manor. Maze Gallery has differences from both of those – it’s in Ink rather than Twine or Inform, and we’re dealing here not with sci-fi mysteries or Lovecraft pastiche, but a sightseeing trip through a fantastical museum, plus its size and number of contributors put it somewhere in the middle of the relatively-compact ADH and the luxuriant sprawl of CM. But by its very nature it has similarities, too, mostly that its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is that it is made by divers hands: there’s always something new around the next corner, and indeed given the open-endedness of the theme, even knowing the name of the room you’re about to visit likely won’t clue you in on what’s to come, but on the flip side, despite a few recurring characters and the epilogue’s valiant attempt to call back to key sequences, the game can feel somewhat scattered, ending because there’s no more content rather than because the experience has hit a climax.
Of course, that’s how museum visits go – you leave because you get tired or because they kick you out – and Maze Gallery leans into its conceit. Your journey starts in an atrium with an information desk (well, disinformation) offering audio tours (well, headphones plugged into potatoes), with a handy directory helping you to plan your visit (except that a disconcerting percentage of the rooms just have ???s marked, and a disquieting number of passages simply lead off-map without any indication of where they end up). You didn’t exactly choose to come here – maybe it’s all a dream? – so your first consideration is to get out, but while the place is rather odd, it’s never (well, rarely) threatening, so might as well sightsee on the way to the gift shop, right? And while the disinformation desk greeter isn’t much help, chortling at the lie they tell you, the game’s authors at least are at pains to make your visit a pleasant one: there’s a map to help you trace your progress across the game’s four acts, with fast travel available whenever you run into a hub room with one of those directories, a goals list keeping track of the tasks you’ve taken on, and an inventory listing the objects you accumulate as well as the impact this place is having on your sense of self (I escaped minus my name and with my teeth rearranged; could have been worse).
From there it’s all about stumbling from one exhibit to another in search of the exit. The map allows you to orient yourself and make a beeline for freedom if you like, in which case the game would probably run about an hour, but I found myself at least popping my head into every room, which wound up taking closer to three. Partially this was from wanting to be able to review the game while doing justice to the anthology format – I didn’t want to miss any author’s contribution, though from the final credits it seems like many wrote more than one room – but also because it’s hard to see a name like “Wing of Four Humors” or “Dead President’s Exhibit” and not want a peek. And Maze Gallery does a good job of rewarding curiosity, with a wide range of experiences on offer – there are classic art spaces where you examine a few nicely-curated objets, installation pieces you can clamber around and inside, labyrinths that take some thinking to navigate, social areas where you can converse with museum staff or other visitors and learn more about their problems, and some that present gentle puzzles, beyond functional spaces like the cafeteria and the aforementioned gift shop (I never did find a bathroom…)
While each author has put their own stamp on the material – there are a few areas that don’t make a big deal out of the fact that they’re written entirely in rhyming couplets, for example – there’s definitely a consistent aesthetic of whimsy, with the amount of threat undergirding it waxing and waning according to preference. A representative excerpt:
Only dim refractions filter into the gloom. A sea snail the size of a sheep dog notices your presence and begins a mad scramble away at 12 centimeters a minute. At the end of the tunnel there is an old oak door that shows no sign of being aware that it is, in fact, in the ocean and not inside a stately manor. Chiseled into the stone above it are the words, “Doll Room”.
It’s a canny choice of style, since it’s sufficiently broad to allow for variation while still feeling coherent. Admittedly, this approach to prose does lend itself to the occasional moment of overreach:
Twinkling fragments of sapphire, a moon of opulent opal, and stars of brilliant pyrite swirl betwixt the lamp’s now-copper borders…. As if to beckon the ephemeral, a melodic voice of silken song seeps from around the turning of the hall.
Similarly, some of what’s presented is a little lame, like “a sculpture of David, but it’s Bernini’s, not Michelangelo’s, and he’s wearing a party hat”. But some of the images here are striking:
Emerging from the ombré walls are dull bronze casts of outstretched hands and legs, a car-sized head half-submerged in the wall with mouth open and gasping for air. A colossal shiny torso covers one entire wall. In the light, you notice deep wrinkles on the sculptures, so detailed that you can see scatterings of freckles and pronounced pores. One of the hands even has a diamond ring.
And how can you not love the cute mice dressed up in red jackets and busbies (there’s a picture)?
…this review risks devolving into a guided tour, which would undermine the fun of properly wandering around the place, so let me just say those examples stand in for a great deal more, most of which I enjoyed a medium to high amount. For all that, I did find myself a bit weary in the last hour or so of the game. Partially this is due to the fact that I found navigating through the gallery somewhat disorienting – the lack of compass directions or an ability to translate the rectilinear visuals presented on the map with the options you’re presented with in a particular room, which sometimes didn’t align with my mental pictures, meant I did more wandering around than I think was intended, even accounting for the out-and-out mazes (it’s funny that I had this experience just as the intermittent forum discussion about how different players relate to different navigation systems – so I’m definitely aware that this choice that didn’t work so well for me might actually be a plus for others).
Beyond that, while the act breaks and map do a good job of letting the player know how much game is left, there’s not much of an organic sense of progression, unlike say Cragne Manor where you gain momentum in the back half of the game as you see how the puzzle chains are starting to resolve and getting a new item can lead to an “aha” that provides a key to earlier barriers that had been stymying you. There are some things that pay off in the Maze Gallery, items you collect in early rooms that get used to good effect later, but the surrealistic nature of the Gallery meant that I couldn’t really predict what would or wouldn’t be useful later (and in fact I finished the game with a lot of unused items as souvenirs of the visit).
I also think the game could use a few more showstopper rooms, like the slaughterhouse bathroom in Cragne Manor – there are some rooms that are intentionally low-key, but none that feel like they’re taking a big big swing and providing some contrast for the medium-scale locations (admittedly, the Clown Alley comes close, but it’s sequenced a little late in the path, and only has a few moments of interactivity, so it didn’t wind up energizing me as much as I’d hoped).
With that said, there’s real pleasure to be had in the charms the game does have to offer, especially the characters: while the nature of the locations was that most of them were places to experience and then move past, there were some stories that stuck with me, like the young blob looking for some kind of self-definition whose anxious parents wanted to help without overstepping, or the bat and the pig who metafictionally quizzed me about narratively significant events while sharing gossip about inter-departmental politics at the Gallery. It’s a lovely potpourri, and my complaints are likely primarily just a symptom of playing Maze Gallery as part of the IFComp firehouse rather than at the more leisurely pace that the material deserves – those comparisons with Cragne Manor above should probably be taken with a grain of salt since my feelings about the game would be vastly different if I’d tried to speed-run my way through its bulk. And after all, nobody likes to be frog-marched through a museum!
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I’d just like to point out that when ferkung was streaming Maze Gallery, jayram dubbed these “earspuds.” And I’m still chuckling over that.
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Hildy, by J. Michael
What are we to make of the genre label which Hildy blithely affixes to itself, “Zorkian Fantasy”? Considered as a setting, it’s simple enough to summarize the relevant tropes: the Great Underground Empire, Enchanter-style magic, grues (all of which feature in Hildy, though you need to go out of your way to find, and be eaten by, the last). But as a genre, we need to consider the themes, and here things get confusing: which Zork? Are we talking about the colonialism, doubling, and metaphysical renunciation that Drew Cook finds in the original trilogy? The austere apocalyptics of Spellbreaker? Perhaps the playful treasure-hunting of mainframe Dungeon, or the don’t-think-too-hard-about-it minigame-frame of Zork Zero?
I confess that I’m no expert – heck, I’ve never even played a game with Zork in its title, though I did work my way through the Enchanter trilogy some years ago – but as best I can tell, Hildy’s answer is “that bit in Sorcerer with the amusement park.” There are other echoes, of course: you play a neophyte enchanter, as in Enchanter, you run around their eponymous Guild for a bit, as in the beginning of Sorcerer, and in a homage to Spellbreaker, you’ll tear your hair out at some of the puzzles (more on that later). But after a linear, more character-driven opening that sees the titular Hildy chewed out for unconventional use of magic, experiencing a crisis of confidence, and on the advice of her mentor going for a walk in the woods to clear her head, she finds her way to a Great Underground Shopping Mall chock full of 1980s puns, where the bulk of the game plays out.
To its credit, it really commits to the bit: you’ll search for spells at Waldenscrolls, see The Implementors Must Be Crazy promoted on the theater’s marquee, and get a pizza at Little Flathead’s; meanwhile, when you magic yourself up an outfit, it comes complete with yellow leggings and orange high tops. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it, but I have to confess I don’t count myself in that audience, especially given the few occasions when the author shows that they’re also capable of a Wodehovian sort of humor that would fit just fine in the Zork wheelhouse:
Field snooker is a sport with an exciting and noble history. The history of the perpetually last place Lucksuckers is neither of those things.
It’s not all fun and games, though – there’s an ancient vampire who’s taken over the mall and turned his victims into ghouls, and to escape that fate you’re going to need to solve some puzzles. For all my mixed feelings about how out of place the mall is, I have to confess it makes a solid backdrop for this kind of adventure – witness Only Possible Prom Dress. Just as in that game, the stores in Hildy provide some light theming for different pieces of several interlocking puzzle chains, with mall-wide challenges like getting the power on and navigating around places the cavern’s decay has made less accessible. There are machinery puzzles, and combat puzzles, and time travel puzzles, and of course lots of spellcasting puzzles. As in the Enchanter trilogy, much of the game is structured around a Metroidvania loop of solving puzzles to get spells (or potions) to solve more puzzles to get more spells – it’s a classic, and it works just as well here as you’d expect (though purists may balk at the way Hildry streamlines some of the traditional elements of the Enchanter system, for example by not requiring you to memorize a spell more than once to cast it multiple times, I appreciated the quality of life upgrades).
Some of these puzzles are quite enjoyable, and I got through about half of the game with only the lightest of hints – getting the lights up and running, defeating my first ghoul, exorcising a cursed mirror. And exploration is typically smooth, with generally strong implementation and the author doing a good job communicating the vibe of each store and location without larding up the descriptions with unnecessary nouns. But after that point, I started turning to the walkthrough more and more frequently. At a macro level, beyond knowing that I was trying to defeat the vampire, it wasn’t clear to me what I was trying to do other then just bumble through any puzzle-looking situation I ran across and hope eventually I’d achieve my goal. And at the tactical level, I ran into a couple of challenges that seemed to require much higher levels of authorial ESP than I possess.
I’ll spoiler-block the one that broke my trust that I’d be able to figure the later puzzles out: so there’s a scroll that’s lodged in a small hollow under a giant pile of debris, which I assumed I needed to find a telekinesis spell to retrieve. But no, actually you’re meant to intuit that you should use the shrink ray next door to make yourself small enough to pick your way through the rubble and grab the scroll. Unfortunately, you can’t aim the ray at yourself, so you need to fix a vending-machine robot (that part was fine), and intuit that of the half-dozenish items on the open-ended list of what’s for sale, the only one you’re actually meant to buy is the makeup compact, since you can use its mirror to reflect the shrink ray. But even that’s not done because you won’t have enough time to get the scroll before growing big again unless you RUN, not walk, through a very specific path. In fairness, use of RUN is prompted in an earlier puzzle, but there are a lot of leaps of logic the player needs to make to even develop a theory of how they might solve this, with no real clues pointing you in the right direction.
Unfortunately this isn’t a one-off, as many of the endgame clues seem very challenging to solve through logic alone. Hildy also starts to feel like it doesn’t trust you to play with your new toolkit once you’re sufficiently tooled up: there’s a late-game sequence where you’re forced into a room with a bunch of ghouls, but you’re not given the chance to act in the scene and invoke the powerful protective magic you have at that point, or even use a disguise spell on the cyclops guarding the door, since the game has a single solution in mind and contrives the timing so that nothing else can even be attempted. As for the climactic vampire confrontation, it relies not only on purely out-of-world knowledge about the vulnerabilities of a vampire, but also incorrect out-of-world knowledge (vampires don’t show up in mirrors, but that doesn’t mean looking in one is typically supposed to hurt them, as well as requiring the player to think back to the earliest moments of the game without much in the way of specific prompts. Adding insult to injury, even after defeating him you need to jump through one last underclued hoop to make it home.
In fairness, there are other elements of Hildy that I enjoyed. There’s some understated storytelling in the environment, low-key mysteries that don’t really matter but which are fun to engage with and develop theories around as you explore. The Guild material also felt promising; the characters aren’t exactly richly-drawn to rise above stereotypes, but the author’s got a good handle on a Harry-Potter-but-Zork vibe that could have easily played a bigger role. And the implementation for what must be a complex magic system struck me as very solid, despite the inherent difficulty involved. But Hildy presents itself first and foremost as a comedy puzzler, and having chosen this take on what being a piece of Zorkian Fantasy means, there’s not much support the other pieces of the design can lend when the going gets too tough and idiosyncratic.
hildy mr.txt (675.7 KB)
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Not only that, but it’s actually an embiggening ray on a timer, as is clear from some experiments with other objects. Apparently, in reflecting the ray, the mirror also reverses both the duration of the timer and the size-changing effect. And I absolutely loved that!
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Yeah, that’s true! It’s a cool puzzle but I think needed a lot more step by step clueing - going from oh hey, an expansion ray to maybe if it bounces off a mirror it becomes a shrink ray to maybe there’ll be a mirror in the compact that’s tucked away in the menu of the vending machine of the robot that’s always running away from me when you don’t even know you need to shrink in the first place (and there are possible misdirections like thinking you’ll need to enlarge the night-shirt rather than shrink to fit it is way too much to have to intuit in a single step IMO - with more partial clueing a la the Babel Fish it could be a great set piece though.
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