MAD WARRIOR (SnackSoft)
Played on: 23rd September
How I played it: Downloaded and ran the Windows executable
How long I spent: 2 hours to make it partway through Floor 5 out of 24
Quick update - you can disregard my complaints about the garbled numbers - it seems like an issue with my operating system after all. See prevtenet’s post below. I won’t rewrite the review right now as I’m supposed to be working, but I’ll keep it in mind when I submit my scores to IFComp.
In my review of The Copper Tavern I talked about first impressions, and MAD WARRIOR is another interesting case study. The lore dump in the IFComp ballot blurb is charmingly bonkers, but then we run the Windows executable and get this:
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MAD WARRIOR
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THE PARSER DUNGEON CRAWLER
TYPE "LOAD" TO BEGIN YOUR PREVIOUS GAME.
TYPE "START" TO BEGIN A NEW GAME.
> START
←[38;2;240;154;82mDUNGEON SURFACE←[0m
←[38;2;232;189;88m←[38;2;232;189;88mTHE JAWS OF THE ←[38;2;237;142;173mDUNGEON←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m CLENCH BENEATH YOU.
WOLF-LIKE WINDS SLICE YOUR SENSES.
A TEMPEST OF GOD'S TEARS WHIP VIOLENTLY,
DRENCHING YOU AS THUNDER RUMBLES IN THE DISTANCE.←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m←[0m←[0m
YOU CAN SEE:
* TRAVEL VENDOR ERMOS
* STAIRS DOWN
>
Okay. So what happened here? What are the numbers and arrows doing there? I’d blame my computer mangling something, but I’m running vanilla Windows 10, and other reviews I peeked at have had the same problem. When I look at the files for MAD WARRIOR (all the JSON databases of rooms and monsters are stored in your Windows AppData folder, along with the Python codebase), I see that description is supposed to have “[GOLD]” at the start, implying that the description is supposed to be printed in golden text but that the code to do this has gotten corrupted while building the Windows executable. But how did this make it to the published game? Did the author get really unlucky with the testing environment and send in a game that works for them and their testers but nobody else? Or did they not have any testers? Or did they even look at the executable themselves?
So we’re distrustful of MAD WARRIOR (which, by the way, will print those garbled numbers in every subsequent room description) from the first screen, and we may start to worry when we try to > look at Ermos, only to be told “YOU CAN’T SEE THAT.” Now, to be fair, the game does have a help menu, accessed with the reasonable “help” command, which gives the correct syntax “look x” as well as other commands. What it does not tell you is how to light a torch, so you might, like me, spend an hour of the game carrying around an unlit torch and a bottle of oil with no idea of how to combine the two, until you eventually notice that the “help” menu gives the command “help help”, which is not an accidental duplication of “help” but rather the command for a second help menu which finally gives the command “oil torch” as opposed to commands like “use oil” which work with most other items. I’m happy for the author and the reader to put this down as the reviewer’s incompetence, but I don’t think I’ve played a game which hid a help command inside another help command like this before. (Oh, also, the command for perusing the vendor’s wares is not “look wares”. It’s just “wares”.)
Having finally got going, we can start to appreciate MAD WARRIOR for what it is, a good old-fashioned dungeon crawler. The plot is all in the blurb, but you don’t need to worry about any of that. You’re a mad warrior; there’s a hole next to you; go in the hole and beat up everything down there. There’s no level-up system or stat building; instead, we get more powerful by scrounging up more powerful weapons and armour. Combat is simplified too – enemies like bats and skeletons have different behaviours and can inflict status effects like poisoning, but actually dealing with them usually amounts to typing “attack” until they fall down or you do. This is broken up with some light puzzling, in the form of “here’s a locked iron gate, and there’s an iron key three rooms away”.
The difficulty curve is steep at first, especially since it takes a while to locate your first altar room, the only rooms in the dungeon that allow you to save your progress. Once you’ve got an altar, things get a lot less tense, especially when you realise that altars heal you to full health, making healing items much less important. It looks like MAD WARRIOR tries to balance this with its level design, as the trip from Floor 4 to Floor 5 is a one-way trip, depriving you of resources unless you use an escape rope to teleport back to the Dungeon Surface. Crawling the dungeon, then, is about thoughtfully choosing what weapons and other consumables you bring down with you to maximise your survivability.
Here is where we encounter the greatest enemy in MAD WARRIOR: your bag. So every item you find in MAD WARRIOR gets put in your bag, apart from whatever weapon you’re using (including torches for dark rooms), which are equipped to your hands. The bag enforces a very tight inventory limit, based on the total weight of items you’re carrying around. This can be a little annoying, but I accept it as a method of increasing the difficulty and forcing the player to make more strategic choices – are you going to drop the antidote to make room for an extra weapon, increasing your flexibility but making poisonous enemies much more dangerous? That kind of thing. (If it bothers you, I think you can edit the save file to increase the inventory capacity easily. I didn’t try it, but it’s only a JSON file.)
What I do object to is the fussiness of the bag. You can’t pick up an item at all until the bag is open, so you have to > open bag before you do any inventory management, and then > close bag when you’re done, because the game won’t let you move until the bag is closed. That’s already irritating, as it costs valuable turns – if you’re poisoned or bleeding, if you have to mess with the bag to get your antidote or bandage, it can cost you more health than you’d expect. (I’m not sure, but I believe that you suffer status effects on failed turns too, so a wrong command can be costly!) Worse yet, MAD WARRIOR insists that everything goes through the bag. So if you find a new weapon, you can’t just equip it – you have to open the bag, then put the weapon in your bag, then take it out of the bag by equipping it. Or if your bag is full, you have to drop items until your bag is empty enough for the weapon, then put the weapon in the bag, then take it out again to equip it, then put your dropped items back in your bag. And then close the bag. Why is it like that? My best guess is that there’s some state machine in the code where you’re either moving around the dungeon or looking at your inventory, and the bag toggles that, but surely there are smoother ways to do this? I have a lot of tolerance for time-wasting in text adventure games (I love to map a maze), but this was a pervasive issue which annoyed me every time.
And yet… MAD WARRIOR compels me. There’s just something that will always be satisfying to me about clearing out a dungeon. The fundamentals here are fine. The quirks are tough to get a handle on and I think there is a lot more that could be done for quality-of-life features (not to mention fixing those garbled room descriptions), but once you get on MAD WARRIOR’s wavelength, you can zone out and go hacking and slashing. I’ve had much longer two-hour play sessions before. I suspect this won’t do that well in the final IFComp rankings, as it’s obviously flawed and doesn’t appear to have been tested properly… but I kinda want to keep playing it. Not a chance anyone’s beating it in two hours like the ballot implies, though.