A Warm Reception (Joshua Hetzel)
Played on: 1st Sept
How I played it: Downloaded the zip file and used Windows Git
How long I spent: 30min for a perfect score
In concept, A Warm Reception is a mild mystery. You’re a journalist who’s arrived at a royal wedding, but the castle is abandoned apart from a monster; defeat the monster while searching for clues to explain what happened.
In practice, this is fairly classical interactive fiction: a parser puzzler set in a screwball fantasy-ish world with treasures to hunt (if you’ve played Zork, you’ve already got the idea). The ultimate goal is to slay a dragon, which is decided by a die roll, which is weighted by how many treasures you have; that’s a nice way of letting you decide how completionist to be. It also means there’s a theoretical universe where your adventurer strolls in, beelines for the dragon, kills it and leaves unprompted. That’s fun to think about.
The author has billed this as having a “limited list of verbs” to work with. This sounds like a limited parser game, maybe like The Wizard Sniffer. But there’s been a bit of a shortcut with the implementation – rather than pruning unnecessary verbs or redirecting them to new responses, the author has just not touched them. This leads to the usual implementation woes:
> x olives
There is nothing interesting about the edible toppings on the pizza.
> eat toppings
That's plainly inedible.
Oh well, who amongst us hasn’t written a parser game and done something like this? And A Warm Reception is pretty clear about the verbs that do work. When you get into the habit of sticking to those commands, it all goes smoothly enough.
I’d also like more scenery implemented. That is a bit more of an issue, because early rooms have minimal scenery implementation, training you not to bother looking at everything in the descriptions. This means later rooms where you do have to investigate the scenery might catch you out; the unspoken rules have suddenly changed. To be fair, the room descriptions strongly suggest you should look at the scenery at those points, but there’s a missed opportunity here to integrate the investigation/journalism strand of the game into the earlier scenes. It might be fun if a player who thinks to look at the furniture early on is rewarded with an extra clue or a bit of flavour text.
I did enjoy this game, though – it works well as a puzzle adventure on the easy end of the scale. Hints are peppered throughout the game, which will be great for newer players who aren’t yet attuned to the ways of the text parser. Stock puzzles show up, but with enough cleverness to make them feel fresh. The darkness puzzle and the maze puzzle are the two best ones, in my opinion; the darkness puzzle is a cute trick which was just unexpected enough to catch me out, and the maze puzzle has a gimmick I’ve not seen before. An honourable mention goes to the casino puzzle, whose solution feels very classical, like something Infocom might pull.
This is one of those reviews where I struggle a bit with the tone, because I really did like the game but I feel I’ve spent most of the review harping on complaints. Yes, there is room for improvement in the implementation, but the fundamentals are really sound, and I really enjoyed the puzzling at the core of A Warm Reception. I hope Hetzel grows more confident with Inform and continues making parser adventures.