ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, by Lazzah (Larry Horsfield)
I have been married for going on eleven years now, and in that time my wife and I have developed our own little habits for certain things. For example, here’s how we celebrate our anniversaries: each year, without fail, we’ll decide what day we want to go out and do something, then I’ll do some research to come up with two or three options that I think would be fun or romantic, present them to my wife, who’ll deliberate for a couple of minutes before making a pick – and then each year, a day or two later, she’ll tell me that she did a little bit of her own digging and came up with an idea that is obviously and objectively way, way better than what I came up with, so we do that instead. Unsurprisingly, that means that over the years, even as we’ve stuck to the exact same formalities, the amount of effort I put into coming up with those initial choices has ratcheted down, because even though part of me has to believe that it’s meaningful effort, the greater part of me knows that it’s really just putting on a show before the inevitable happens.
I’ve got something of the same learned helplessness when it comes to Larry Horsfield’s old-school ADRIFT parser puzzlers (yes, that’s the kind of segue you can only get from a Mike Russo review, at least for another two or three generations of LLMs). Every time I read the preview, get excited at the idea of testing my wits against a long, fiendishly-tricky fantasy adventure, read through the extensive instructions and pre-game material while psyching myself up for the challenge, explore the opening area and pat myself on the back for successfully deploying a LOOK BEHIND or LOOK UNDER or two – then get stuck, realize there are no hints, allow my low-level social anxiety to prevent me from taking the author up on the invitation to email them for the walkthrough, and quit in shame. Once or twice, with especially short and easy games, I’ve managed to break the pattern and make substantial progress or even win the thing, but friends, I think this was my worst showing yet, akin to asking my wife if she wants to just spend our anniversary at the second-closest McDonalds (it’s marginally nicer than the closest one!)
I’m disappointed, since until I hit a brick wall I was having a good time. The inciting incident is ridiculous – the village elder sends your village into high alert because someone has stolen the pipe of the evil warlock Rummikum Rummkub, and dragoons you into a quest to recover it – but the other villagers also think it’s a bit much, and there’s a similar amount of just-getting-on-with-it charm to the game’s extremely white-bread fantasy world. Sure, it’s a mismash, with the village boasting a longhouse, a roundhouse, a yort (sic?), and a church complete with stained glass and a nave, but the matter-of-fact prose and just-detailed-enough implementation successfully evoke a classic adventuring vibe. And it was satisfying to run around gathering supplies for the adventure, finding food and water, retrieving your dagger, and so on – that kind of low-key grounding makes the grand fantasy bits stand out all the more.
I never actually got to any of those grand fantasy bits, though, since when I tried to leave the village in pursuit of the thief, an out of character voice told me I needed something from the church. That’s a better approach than letting the player get into a walking dead state, I suppose, but the problem was there was no in-game reason why I would expect there to be anything hidden in the church, nor any clue as to what I was supposed to do there – I messed around with the pews, fumbled around with some carved decorations, tried to steal the god’s statue from the altar (at some point my score went from 10/650 to 5/650, and in retrospect this might have been where I made my blunder), and admitted defeat some 15 minutes later.
Before fully giving up on the game, I made a half-hearted attempt at the other puzzle I was aware of, prompted by reading a book indicating that I’d need some ashes in case I ran into a giant spider later (it’s somehow supposed to confuse them). I’d found a dirty fireplace but couldn’t get a container to scrape the ash into. The miller at the edge of town has a giant pile of empty sacks, which seemed promising, but he wouldn’t let me borrow one or even try to buy one, and realizing that I couldn’t swap gold for an empty burlap sack made me realize that progress in this game was going to depend more on lawnmowering through the command list than thinking up reasonable solutions to obstacles, and I just couldn’t muster up the requisite enthusiasm, since I was sure that even if I did eventually figure these two puzzles out, I’d inevitably come a cropper on some future challenge. Farewell, Alyas of Star – sorry, ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, we barely knew ye, you put in a lot of effort and I barely made any, but that’s just the pattern we’ve settled into after all these years.
Alyas MR.txt (71.9 KB)
EDIT: Upon getting a in-retrospect-kinda-obvious-though-still-unmotivated hint from the author in the thread below, I was able to get through my ecclesiastical blockage, and after some comedic back and forth where I was prevented from venturing forth on my grand adventure until I’d secured that most critical piece of a hero’s equipage, a tea towel, finally made it to the game proper. I actually started making some solid progress, working through some solidly-clued puzzles to get rid of a pack of wild dogs, explore a deserted village, and uncover some secrets hidden in an enchanted forest. Then I ran out of steam trying to get down from a hundreds-of-feet-high escarpment – I’m worried I might have released a genie too early – but still, with a respectable 150/650 points, and having enjoyed some solid adventure-gaming, I’m much more satisfied both with myself and with the game than I was yesterday.
Alyas MR 2.txt (139.4 KB)
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