The Alchemist (Older Timer)
Played on: 14th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran the Windows executable
How long I spent: 2 hours – didn’t finish, got 180/300 points
The Alchemist is a parser puzzle game which bills itself as “old-school”. I didn’t finish it in time, but based on my final score I’d guess it’s 3-4 hours long. The player character is tasked with finishing an important experiment by the titular Alchemist, Ezekiel Throgmeister (great name) – unfortunately, Ezekiel is far too busy to explain what the experiment is, so the player must explore his mansion to gather clues and materials.
Let’s talk about that parser, first of all. IFComp gets one or two custom text parser engine games a year – that is, the author has built their own parser rather than use a “standard” engine like Inform or TADS. Doing this allows the author great flexibility with presentation and multimedia which you can’t get in standard parser engines, which need to be agnostic about what interpreter will be running them. The author also gets to make deeper decisions about, say, how save data will be recorded, which might be necessary if you need your game to do something very particular that the standard parsers can’t do.
But the thing about Inform and TADS and the rest is that many of them are the product of literal decades of community work. They carry so many quality-of-life features, and such deep parsing of language (recognising pronouns, accepting multiple instructions in one line, etc.) that a custom parser built by one author cannot hope to match. (Dialog has just about managed it within four-or-so years of public work and who-knows-how-many years of private tinkering by a mostly-solo developer, which is a minor miracle. It can be done, but it’s bloody hard work.) So it’s a dangerous game, building your own parser. You get to do great things with how your game looks and acts, but if it’s even a little more annoying to control than Inform, people will notice.
The Alchemist’s QBasic-based engine is up there with the best custom parsers I’ve played in IFComp. It may help that this isn’t the first game Older Timer’s made with this system, so there have been opportunities to refine it, but it’s the first one that I’ve played, and I was very happy with it. Almost everything I would expect is present and correct – abbreviations for common verbs, pronouns, multiple commands in one line, the works. The big missing feature is an Undo function, as you might learn the hard way, but The Alchemist is pretty generous – it’s mostly impossible to make unwinnable (or so the game claims, and I didn’t find any mistakes), and the one deliberately unwinnable situation that I know of outright tells you to save your game beforehand. There are a couple of other quirks, like a painful save-restore system which has you type the name of the file you want to load (it really is old-school – I’ve been spoiled by GUIs) and an odd insistence on specifying containers when you’re trying to take items from them, but there’s nothing you can’t learn and work around.
In return, you get a good-looking game. Coloured text and simple ASCII art is used well for pull-out quotes and for certain puzzles (though I think such puzzles may not be colourblind-friendly, so watch out for that), and there’s an option to recolour the screen to different themes. Sound files are played at appropriate moments to punctuate puzzle solutions. (Unfortunately, my run of the game stopped playing sounds at some point, but I’ll put that down to a freak glitch.) The really clever idea, though, is that The Alchemist’s engine hooks up certain common commands to the function keys on your keyboard, and lets you reassign them. That’s such a nice quality-of-life feature. I didn’t take the time to play with this much, but I can see where I’d like to use it in The Alchemist.
How about the actual game? It’s a classic puzzle adventure, the kind of thing that’s the bread-and-butter of text adventures: explore a big weird place, solve puzzles everywhere, and open doors to other parts of the big weird place. The story is an excuse to get the player to ransack this mansion, really – which is fine, goodness knows there are a lot of old-school adventures with far thinner premises. There have been suggestions that there is more to the plot – a few odd-looking rooms in the house, an interesting random event or two – but the other shoe doesn’t drop in the first two hours so I can’t guarantee that.
The writing is just a little off, with a bunch of long and flowery run-on sentences and the occasional double-width space. It took me a while to realise why: the text is all justified, but the font is fixed-width, meaning that every description is written so that every line is exactly 75 characters long. This is a lot of effort put into supporting the visual presentation and I wouldn’t have noticed or complained if it hadn’t been there. The writing isn’t bad by any means, but I think it could improve without this artificial constraint.
I didn’t find the puzzles too difficult, for the most part. They’re not trivial, but I clicked pretty well with them and made good progress: I made it to 180/300 points in my two hours, and I never needed to use a hint. The one puzzle I got stuck on was crossing the fissure, but I worked it out myself, and I thought the solution was clear and fair. It’s a good thing, too, because the puzzle arrangement is very linear. There’s usually only one thing to work on at a time, and if you’re paying attention, whenever you find a new item it should be pretty clear where and how you use it. If the puzzles were hard, this could be annoying, getting you stuck on a puzzle with nothing else to work on. But because The Alchemist is relatively gentle, instead it’s very satisfying to knock down puzzle after puzzle like a chain of dominoes. And although the arrangement of puzzles is linear, your actual movement through the game world is not; the puzzle chain folds back on itself nicely, with constant re-usage of old concepts and locations.
The Alchemist is old-school in presentation and setting, but this puzzle design is much kinder and gentler than the sprawling entangled cruel puzzlefests of a Zork or a Curses. The puzzles actually reminded me a lot of escape room games. Not the escape rooms in real life that cost too much money and you have to do as team-building exercises; I mean the casual little Flash puzzle games that you used to find on JayIsGames. The Alchemist has a lot of similar puzzles, like simple key-door combinations and finding codes to apply somewhere else, and it’s pitched at about the same difficulty. If you’ve been yearning for Happy Coin Escape, you’ll probably get on well with The Alchemist.
I’m very fond of this game. It has its quirks, but they’re manageable, and the actual puzzling is a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to finishing it off after the competition.