I’m starting a thread because my series on Infocom’s Moonmist has begun.
Full disclosure: I’ve never liked it, though I hope to treat it fairly.
Discussion doesn’t have to be about my essays; any Moonmist discussion would be welcome!
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Do the mysteries all take place in the same map or are there four different maps?
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It’s the same map, and the contents of the rooms are largely the same. The biggest differentiators are outcomes when searching containers.
I completed all four mysteries for the sake of this series, and while some of the different endings were noteworthy (more on that to come!), the paths to those endings felt repetitive.
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Part 2 is up! I wanted to explore negative responses to paratext in Moonmist, which make sense, but what makes the tourist brochure different from other in-universe pack-ins found in 1980s games?
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Nice post! Moonmist’s documentation makes me think of the Gold Box approach as well (possibly I’ve mentioned this to you before; I’m still nursing a cold and my memory is even spottier than usual). But when making that comparison, I realized that there’s a big difference: in Pool of Radiance et seq, when you get to a place where there’s a journal entry, the game specifically draws your attention to it and typically requires you to press enter to resume the game. So the player is directly prompted to refer to the paratext; in Moonmist, of course, outside of the oblique in-game references to the brochure, there’s nothing really pushing the player to consult the feelie. Would the game be better if it put some friction in front of the player to encourage them to take a minute to peruse the brochure? Probably not, honestly, given that there’s nothing really essential there so far as I recall, but it’s interesting to consider.
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My take is that players will tolerate paratext that supplements content, but they aren’t open to replacing gameplay with paratext.
Offloading identified nouns to a feelie in a parser game is a bit like offloading combat in a CRPG to a game book. It’s that fundamental.
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Savage Island got away with putting its entire epilogue in a feelie, but I think that’s because:
- It was the epilogue, so players who got there were already pretty invested in the game
- It let the epilogue be way more verbose than the platform would otherwise have allowed
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It’s been some time since I read one of your posts, and I always forget how good they are! There were a lot of games I didn’t even know existed from that time period…
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