- <>Chronicles of the Moorwakker<> (by @Jupp)
A text-based RPG with combat tactics and levelling-up your abilities. I must say, I haven’t played a lot of games in this genre. The closest thing I can compare Moorwakker to in my limited experience is probably Roadwarden, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And I must say, with a bit more polish and the eradication of those last few coding errors and minor flaws I encountered in this iteration, Jupp’s game can proudly stand next to Moral Anxiety Studio’s creation.
Chronicles of the Moorwakker takes the player along through an intriguing and well-composed story. The basic backbone of the narrative is the well-known and and very effective (especially in IF) “uncover the backstory”-structure. Moorwakker drops a few surprising hooks early on which serve as enticing starting points for the search for deeper understanding.
Progress through the narrative is subtly and unobtrusively gated to ensure the player has gathered enough information and/or strength to be ready for the next chapter. Perhaps an advantage of the choice-based system, this can be done by directional links simply appearing or disappearing at the right time, instead of placing a conspicuous locked gate or guard asking for a shrubbery on the protagonist’s path.
At the beginning of my journey, I did encounter a few continuity glitches, where the fragment I was reading contained surprising or unexpected information, seeming to rely on knowledge from another branch I had not yet found. This could just as well be my brain still finding its way into the story and not being in the zone enough yet.
The writing was both efficient and emotionally gripping.
– On the smaller scale of individual fragments, each screen has no more than a few sentences, a short paragraph or two at most (with some exceptions for longer events). Those select few words still manage to convey the atmosphere of the present location, drive the story along a bit, and highlight some particularly moodsetting details of the surroundings. Strong sparse writing.
– On the larger scale, the overarching structure, Moorwakker begins as a broad adventure-style “Quest for Knowledge and Weapons”, and, with enough of the backstory exposed, increasingly zooms in on the narrower and more pressing objective of tracking down the culprit responsible for the main character’s hardships, and perhaps to seek revenge. Looking back after having played The Cronicles of the Moorwakker, this zooming in becomes an almost cinematic experience, especially by how it’s reflected in the game’s use of space.
There are a couple of nifty buttons at the bottom of the screen. [Inventory] shows (obviously), the weapons, talismans, potions and whatnot the PC is carrying. [Journal] opens a log of the lessons and discoveries found encountered so far. On this screen, there is also a link to the [Map].
This beautifully drawn map gives a sense of wide-open space and an abundance of possibilities. Even though the actual number of available directions is limited and carefully pruned, the visual map paired with the moody location descriptions presents an impression of an expansive land to explore.
Travel through the gameworld feels organic. This is especially noticeable when an obstacle (or just a pinch of sudden curiosity) drives one off the intended path, away from the planned destination. The newly taken route never feels forced, but rather a natural consequence of the circumstances. It definitely helps that the new path or detour is itself always rewarding or thrilling with its own range of fresh discoveries or, um, sometimes less-fresh dangers…
While exploring the land, I particularly enjoyed the variation between long travels between far-apart landmarks such as towns or moors across great distances on the one hand, and the much more tightly-knit, almost parser-like room-to-room movement between adjacent locations in some of the larger areas. My investigation of the Eastern Moor felt especially tense and wriggly, with danger lurking behind every corner. I got out pen and paper to sketch a map of that confusing patch of marshland.
The fine-grained parser-like navigation culminates in the final chapter, with a spine-tingling search of The Castle, which illustrates the narrative narrowing of focus reflected in the use of space I mentioned above.
While I don’t usually pay much attention to graphics in text-games, they certainly add to the overall quality of Moorwakker.
Each screen has its own small and delicate grey-tone drawing to augment the atmosphere. Even aside from the content of the drawings, their placement serves well for dividing the screen, providing a resting space for the eyes and greater reading comfort.
The quality of the graphics ranges from nice and pretty, like the landscape renderings which offer an enhanced visual grasp of the surroundings, to exquisite and deeply moving, as seen in the final confrontation with the main adversary. The facial expressions of the NPC in question gave me the creeps!
I’ve gone on at length about the narrative qualities of The Chronicles of the Moorwakker, the writing, handling of space, graphics that drive and enhance the story. Time to turn to the challenges that make the game enjoyably hard for the player to work through.
Although I have learned to enjoy, and indeed have wholeheartedly embraced, choice-based interactive fiction, I’m still predominantly a player of parser-based text-adventures. The kinds of puzzles and obstacles that are familiar to me are few and far between in Chronicles of the Moorwakker. There are some locked gates, some incantations to remember, some objects to combine, but nothing very complicated. Success in overcoming these obstacles mainly depends on thorough exploration beforehand, similar to the text-adventure approach of “grab/read everything you can get your hands on”. This will almost guarantee that you have the requisite objects or knowledge once the need arises. This also means that oftentimes you will “see the ladder before you’ve encountered the cliff”, meaning that you’ll find yourself carrying around objects just because you came across them, with no purpose or intention aside from the out-of-game motivation that this is what adventurers in games do.
Over the course of the journey, gaining a deeper understanding of the gameworld and its (magical) rules, it will become clear what to use when and where. In this aspect of puzzles, there are no brainbreakers. Memory, in-world common sense, and determination to travel all available paths wil suffice.
There’s no grinding, levelling-up flows naturally from thorough exploration, interaction with NPCs, and of course combat against adversaries whose strengths are well-tuned to your own at each level of the game. (I did play in easy mode. The adversaries may well be somewhat tougher on higher difficulty settings. Speaking of easy mode, this also lets you skip combat entirely, throwing you the win automatically and continuing with the story. If you’d want that…)
Ah! Combat.
There’s that word. Actually the whole RPG combat thing is pretty far outside my comfort zone. Micromanaging powers, attacks, and defenses is normally not really my cuppa. (I consider switching from sword to bow in Dink Smallwood a big deal…)
And Chronicles of the Moorwakker certainly has a fair deal of micromanaging. Summon beasts to shapeshift and use their abilities, summon rune-ghosts to strengthen yourself or weaken the enemy, decide when to attack or defend with your “normal” weapon (and which weapon to use at the start of a fight). All these things can influence each other, so it’s necessary to take into account the effects of combinations of beast, ghost, and weapon… Not to mention timing the extra potions or alchemical bombs in your inventory…
But!
The more I experimented, the more this intricate combat-system grew on me. It turned out to be a very tasty cuppa after all.
Once I had consciously shifted my perspective away from the superficial “fighting”, I realised that this is where the real puzzles lay. It became very satisfying to calculate (or guesstimate, or feel in my left pinky toe) the best timing to hit the enemy hard, or when to use a combination tactic that sacrificed one of my summonings in exchange for a quick mid-battle healing.
In this way, not only did Moorwakker provide a very pleasant gaming experience, but maybe it also nudged my view of RPG-combat in general toward a more positive inclination.
Which is nice.
In all, a truly wonderful start of my Spring Thing Festival. The bar is set, and it’s set high.
Next up is @svlin’s Cut the Sky. From my experience with SV Linwood’s previous games, that high bar may well be reached (or even surpassed) in the following week of Spring Thing gaming. See you later!
