I am incredibly grateful to all reviewers but I believe it’s unwise to comment on specifics during the judging period. So here is a blanket THANK YOU for making the effort to review my game, no matter what you thought of it. You make the IF Comp so much more interesting by being a part of it.
If you want to meet a magical cat, you need to choose The Netherlands/Dutch character.
Quick question (@mandybwriting): am I missing something or is there really no way to SAVE in An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There ?
This seems weird for a Twine labelled “2 hours” .
No big deal, but I want to know if I should set up a [Do Not Disturb] sign next to my laptop for two hours tonight.
There is no way to save unfortunately! Sorry about that. If it helps it takes some people much less time, but I went with the conservative estimate
Strange happenings indeed. Although starting from a most mundane of circumstances (your phone ringing from within a locked desk drawer), BOSH (great acronym!) soon evolves into a multidimensional quest.
I haven’t gotten nearly far enough yet for a complete review, but what I did see was good. Very good.
A diverse setting with Hyperplanes and time-traveling would lend itself perfectly, even dangerously well for uninhibited zaniness. Fortunately, the author keeps the reins tight, and the bizarreness is kept in check by the unifying frame-narrative of an Area51/X-Files style investigation bureau.
The location descriptions are clear, even though the locations themselves may be unintuitive (cf. the Hyperplane mentioned above). The writing is at its most impressive in its handling of NPCs. A few well-chosen mannerisms provide them with recognisable uniqueness, they fill the awkward silences when the PC is X-ing the room right in front of them with in-character commentary and out-loud thoughts.
The conversations themselves are helped along with a helpful list of available topics to gently guide the player along. This list of topics was sometimes a bit too restrictive, as I found that some questions I asked or objects I showed were dismissed out of hand, while I thought they were perfectly reasonable.
The puzzles I encountered so far were not too hard, rewarding attentive exploration and applying common sense. There was that one puzzle where I spent at least half an hour of my alloted Comp maximum drawing a detailed logical diagram to deduce the rules of the world. I did manage to predict the consequences of my actions, but still didn’t manage to find the solution. Until I figured out I had missed the obvious clue right in front of me. Classic case of overthinking and jumping ahead. I was laughing while I slapped my forehead.
Rewarding puzzles, great NPC-interactions, engaging setting. I’ll be cheerfully getting lost in the world of BOSH for a good few hours more.
I seriously considered just putting up this image and leaving it at that. To me, this captures the entire experience of closely reading and playing House of Wolves perfectly. The protagonist is the mismatched peg, being pounded and twisted and pummeled and wrung in order to match.
It’s quite the hard read, hammering the message home through unforgiving repetition and exquisite-yet-appalling use of the forced single click. In a visceral hard-to-stomach sequence the traumatising experiences of the supposedly ill-shapen peg are dragged out for the reader.
Dream-sequences in-between break the relentlessness a bit. Longer, more leisurely sentences, a flow of consciousness meandering round a variety of sensory impulses. And a glimmer of hope? There, hardly seen, just close enough to hang onto, maybe?
Simply summing up the content-warnings already gives a nigh-complete summary of the game:
Content warning: abuse, bigotry, coercion
But it’s well-written abuse, bigotry, coercion. Especially if the player tries to derail the expected order of events and the narrator changes tone…
The metaphor is perhaps a bit too much of the sledgehammer-and-anvil type, but in the short experience that is House of Wolves, this approach works. I can feel it in my gut.
Another entry for my ever-growing list of Mansion-games! (I promise, I’ll get round to putting an actual list on IFDB one of these days. I swear…) The fact that I even seriously entertain the idea for such a list shows that dropping your protagonist in a mansion without much of a preamble or explanation and basically saying: “Now off you go! Just poke around and figure out what goes on here,” is a premise that a) is done a lot, and b) has proven its worth.
It’s a set-up, a frame for the author to let loose their imagination within known boundaries, and to play with the expectations that pop up in the player’s brain as soon as they notice it’s a Mansion-game.
In other words, it’s all about the filling.
And hoooo-boy does Mandy Benavav deliver on the filling!
From the get-go, the description the Mansion sets the tone:
—“The house is a small two story Victorian, remarkably well kept, with dark siding and darker trim. It stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.”
An unsettling scene, leaning towards the dark and the Gothic, with an unusual and evocative image, a simile both vivid and slightly droll.
The writing continues in this vein, delicately walking the tightrope between earnest gloom and frivolous spark.
Not too far along in the game, the source of this consistent tone makes itself known: the narrator peeks from behind the curtain and directs some remarks straight at you, the player. One would expect this breaking of the fourth wall to also shatter the carefully woven moody atmosphere, but it doesn’t.
—“The foyer stands ready, awaiting your eye. Let’s not pretend we’re above snooping - after all, who doesn’t love a good snoop? You’re among friends - I won’t tell if you care to poke about the room. A narrator’s job is not to judge; merely recount.”
Instead, by revealing himself, the narrator re-affirms the unity of tone. The deep tone of his (I imagined an Ian McKellen reciting the story in a grave note, unable to keep himself from interjecting his own comments on the state of affairs every once in a while) voice suffuses the Mansion and lends character to it, and reassures the player that they’re in good hands.
Indeed, instead of concealing the directional and inventory options under functional clicks so bland as to be almost unnoticeable, here the narrator generously sets forth our options in elaborate and (jokingly?) empathic propositions:
Has the scent of pulp overpowered your senses? The ticking of the clock quickening your pulse? Then perhaps you should return to the foyer.
Or perhaps you wish to take stock of your possessions.
----looks over his shoulder at the wall of text rising above him----
Ahem! Well. I really like the narrator. That’s probably clear by now.
But…
Of course this disembodied narrative voice, regardless of setting-infusing gravitas or witty side-remarks, must perform the job set before him: recount the text the author has written.
And it’s good text.
I’ve already mentioned the descriptions, moody Gothic with a twist.
—“The webs occupy only a tasteful amount of ceiling space; not so much as to give the impression of homely neglect, but just enough to give the spiders their due.
You think you see your echo wiggle slightly in one of the webs. You wonder how many others are trapped up there.”
(The detail about the trapped echo made me shiver with delight and trepidation…)
What is most impressive however is the variety of unique characters that inhabit the Mansion. Each with their own little mannerisms and idiosyncratic speech, they come across as singular individuals. Grotesque, perhaps, somewhat caricatural. On the edge of becoming a menagerie of quirks and oddities, a display of curiosities, even.
But here again, the tightness and consistency of the narrative tone (----Yes, Sir Ian, take a bow, so everyone can see you…----) provides a unifying frame where all these eccentrics may perform their personal peculiarities freely and naturally to their hearts’ content.
—“In a shower of soapy water, the Octopus again raises all eight appendages, this time holding an assortment of dirty dishes, brushes, rags, and sponges. For each dish, a cleaning implement.
It begins industriously scrubbing, three dishes at a time, with one arm on drying duty. With its final arm, it holds a can of tuna, which it periodically slaps with its dish towel at rhythmic intervals.
As it scrubs, you discern a certain pattern in the noise…”
***
“You strain your ears. It could be your imagination but you could swear that the rhythm of the brushing is set to the drinking song from La Traviata, with the occasional soap bubble popping to emphasize the high notes.
Well fancy that.”
The puzzles in An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There are a combination of fetch-quest chains and social interaction with the quirky inhabitants who all seem to want something that involves getting it from someone else.
Which means you need to know where everything and everyone is. Exploration time!
The Mansion is not that big, but it sure is very full and alive. The social fetch-quests force you to repeatedly visit the same rooms, but with the prospect of a new conversation topic or even the conclusion to a puzzle and the accompanying reward, this never gets dull.
Each floor of the house is gated off, ensuring that the player has seen and adequately searched the rooms on that floor, and has been introduced to the characters residing there.
While on the topic of exploration, I have to specifically mention the bookcase in the library. That thing is a goldmine for fantasy and horror references. There had to be something of importance in there, so I started clicking a few of the books (nicely rendered in a minimalist graphic) at random, thinking I’d have to dig my way through a bunch of increasingly far-fetched made-up titles. I got a real jolt of nerdy joy when I stumbled upon Gormenghast! And there were more: Wooster&Jeeves, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Tigana, Terry Pratchett,…! I jotted down a bunch of titles and authors I don’t know to look them up in the local library, although I doubt if they will have a copy of A True and Accurate Account of the Invention of Penguins by Lord Pendleton Stickwidth, Royal Explorer…
It’s a bit of a cheap trick, namedropping to remind the reader of a shared membership of the coolest club on earth, but it works. With each title I recognised, I glowed a bit more.
In a very parser-like fashion, the individual objects of importance are often buried under a few layers of clicks, going from the general description of the room to a list of items to examine closer.
And it’s here, in this hybrid parser/click gameplay, that I at last find some small naggles to complain about. Some minor annoyances to give this review at least a semblance of critical assessment and attempted objectivity.
On the parser-choice scale, the hybrid that is An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There sometimes has trouble choosing and holding its spot. While you’re meticulously searching rooms, manipulating the environment, and running around carrying objects (in a perfectly handled inventory) from one room to the next to offer them to NPCs or use them to solve puzzles, which are quintessential parser-things to do, there are also a number of times when the game carries out an action for you or automatically solves a part of the puzzle. At these moments, I felt robbed of the agency that the heavy parser-feel of the game had promised me.
Two examples, one of slight disappointed surprise, one where my parser-expectations made a solution invisible:
-I would have loved to be able to TAKE the teddybear, instead of having automatically added to my inventory. Just that small moment of picking it up as a separate action, with an accompanying description of touching the soft fur, or sneezing because of the dust…
-The fact that the eggs were just waiting on the kitchen counter until I had the other ingredients, that I wasn’t able to manipulate them as a separate object during my first search through the kitchen, blurred my memory of them as useful objects. I tottered up and down the stairs half a dozen times, looking in the rooms for links unclicked. When I finally turned to the walkthrough and saw “Don’t worry about them - they’re next to the stove, you’ll just grab them when you go to cook.”, I felt misled. Perhaps by my own misplaced parser-expectations (which the game had nourished all the way through), but misled nonetheless…
In short, I think An Account of Your Vist to the Enchanted House & What You Found There would benefit from a firmer stance somewhat more to the finer-grained parser side of the spectrum.
In conclusion, I loved it. Such flair and mood, such wonderful characters and conversations, such beautiful atmospheric writing!
This version has champagne bubbles instead of soap bubbles!
Thanks!
>GET
LAMPCUP
You take a longish stroll through the forest, looking at the pretty flowers. On the way you talk to some neighbours and defeat some adversaries. These encounters form a series of gags, some amusing, some less so. At the end you get your cup.
An intruiging mystery which, after a few well-aimed pokes, turns out to be naught but a bit of mildly humorous confusion quickly resolved.
There will be a pause in my reviewing because we’re installing a new kitchen. (Which means first breaking down the old one.)
I’m still playing and rating, but I can’t find the time to sit down for an hour or more to write detailed reviews.
Short recap of my recent sessions:
-The Saltcast Adventure: They are just like Us, if you take the time to get acquainted. Great backstory, original creation myth, good “villain”. Bit longwinded to my taste, could use some more agency at times. Memorable characters, especially the Scarred Host.
-Awakened Deeply: Intruiging world, exciting mystery. Many bugs and annoyances → lack of testing and proofreading. Kudos to the author for obvious passion.
