It’s also the closest relative of English that isn’t descended from Anglo-Saxon!
If you draw a family tree of English and its close relatives:
All the various modern dialects of English have a (more-or-less) shared ancestor in the Early Modern English of Shakespeare’s time
Shakespeare’s Early Modern English and Scots (“Lowland Scots”, not “Highland Scots” or “Scottish Gaelic”, which is a Celtic language) have a shared ancestor in the Middle English of Chaucer’s time
Chaucer’s Middle English and various other extinct varieties have a shared ancestor in the Old English or Anglo-Saxon that predated the Norman Invasion
Anglo-Saxon and Frisian have a hypothetical but completely unattested shared ancestor known as “Proto-Anglo-Frisian” or “Proto-Ingvaeonic”
There’s no direct evidence of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic, but English, Scots, and Frisian have several differences from the rest of the Germanic languages, and like in biology, enough shared mutations tends to point to a common ancestor! For example, there’s the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which got rid of nasals (M and N) before fricatives (like S, F, and TH (θ)): English “mouth”, Scots mooth, Frisian müd, but Dutch mond (Latin mentum). Or, Anglo-Frisian palatalization, where K turned into a CH (tʃ) sound before I and E: English and Scots “cheese”, Frisian tsiis, but Dutch kaas (Latin cāseus).
…this has nothing to do with anything in the reviews, it’s just the one thing I know about Frisian and I was giving a lecture on this two weeks ago.
P.S. If the Anglo-Frisian languages turned NTH into just TH (mouth, tooth, etc), why do we have “month” and “tenth”? Well, those came later! We used to have a -th suffix that makes nouns of various sorts, but apart from numbers (four > fourth), we don’t really use it any more. Now we mostly see it in fossils, without much connection to their original source: you probably recognize that “health” and “heal” are related, but might not have realized that “stealth” comes from “steal” (which used to mean “be subtle”, as in “steal away”, before it took on its modern meaning) or “wealth” comes from “weal” (“success”, now used only in the archaic phrase “weal and woe”).
Well, that same suffix appears in “month”, which comes from “moon”!
That said, mechanically the game seems OK to me. It was always clear what to do next, the use of text color was a nice and sensible touch… Last year’s Into The Lion’s Mouth, for example, was much more confusing.
But yeah, the plot is WEIRD. I haven’t played “Bureau of Strange Happenings” yet, but I seriously doubt that happenings there can be as strange as in “Big Fish.”
What did you think of the Frisian character in Dust? In the German version (Staub) they had a very distinct accent, but I don’t think it came across in the English version.
We used to say ‘mystery is hard’ when talking about interactive fiction. But there are several well-done mysteries in this year’s competition, and I’m feeling that maybe the genre has been solved? Not in the sense that there is one true approach – these well-done games are very different from each other – but in the sense that we’ve got enough experience and good design patterns that making a good mystery IF is no longer intrinsically harder than making a good dungeon exploration IF, say.
Miss Gosling’s Last Case is a mystery in the Agatha Christie sub-genre: a smart detective, a less smart police inspector, a rich person’s house as the closely confined setting, a limited list of suspects, and not much action. Of course Christie used to vary on that theme, and so does Stelzer. Most importantly, Miss Marple, I mean Miss Gosling, is dead. The game starts when you find yourself dead at the bottom of the stairs. The police inspector thinks that it’s an accident, but you know you’ve been poisoned. As a ghost, you can’t actually do anything yourself. Luckily, however, your faithful dog can see you; and parser commands are all understood as attempts to tell your (very smart and very well trained) dog to do things.
The game is written in a hybrid style where you can use either clickable links or typed-in parser commands. (The links only look like links, I think; they actually construct and run parser commands.) I started out using the links, but quickly fell back to typing because it is so much faster. I didn’t find a way to remove the box of links that’s taking up screen space, which was slightly irritating. I did find a way to turn off the immensely intrusive hints that attempt to spoil the first puzzle for you even when you’re not yet stuck. (Hint: type ‘hints off’.)
But those were the only irritations. Once it gets going, Miss Gosling’s Last Case is fun, engaging, well-written, fair, logical, and solid. The puzzles all make sense and reward experimentation. For me, they were at the exact right level of difficulty. This was probably my best puzzle experience of the competition.
I also like that you’re spending most of the game trying to prove the innocence of people. Only at the end do we get a twist where we need to catch the real culprit – whose guilt does cast some doubt on the supposedly superior knowledge of people of Miss Gosling. But it’s satisfying. You’ve also been taught all the skills that are necessary to solve the climactic puzzle, which is a mechanism I really appreciate.
So, this is not a mystery game that ends with you having to choose whom to accuse, unlike Winter-Over and The Killings in Wasacona. It’s more a traditional puzzle game with a mystery flavour. But as far as I’m concerned, Miss Gosling’s Last Case proves that that is a perfectly good approach to the genre.
Winter-Over is another strong entry in this year’s surprisingly good roster of mystery/detective games. This time, we’re in the Fiasco playset The Ice. No, wait, we are just in Pickering Station, Antarctica, and that’s a good thing too, because the stuff that happened during the Fiasco game I played… well, you know, what happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica.
Detective games generally work well when there is a limited setting and set of suspects, and being snowed in in a research base during the Antarctic winter fits that very well. No police will show up for ten days; you are trapped inside with your brother’s murderer; everybody is going crazy from the eternal night; it’s a perfect set-up for some detective work with a slight edge of horror/thriller.
Winter-over leans into that horror/thriller aspect without ever letting it dominate the detective game. We’ve got a stress stat, but managing it isn’t too hard, in part because relaxing and investigating sometimes require the same actions. The protagonist is written as being extremely on edge and reacting weirdly, but never such that his detective work suffers a serious blow. Most importantly, the killer is going to sabotage us in several, quickly escalating ways as the search for truth continues. That gave the game a very dynamic and unpredictable feel that I enjoyed.
I’m not the biggest fan of the interface, because you’re clicking a lot to do even simple things. This is not so noticeable in the initial stages of the game, when you are investigating everything; but it becomes very noticeable later on, when a simple plan like “I need to talk to X” will usually involve first checking the schedule, then clicking several times to move to the desired spot, then talking. And that’s when you know where X is. If you don’t know, you’ll be clicking even more as you try to find them. This made play feel slower than it could have been.
I am a big fan of the evidence structure. I’ve only played the game once, but my sense is that there is a lot of evidence to uncover, including multiple ways to realise that the innocent people are innocent and multiple ways to find out who the guilty person is. I discovered the telephone only relatively late in the game, and managed to unlock it, then show it to someone I had not been suspecting but also had not seen any exonerating evidence for… and they cracked. Just in time! I had only a day left! So that was actually perfect. I can imagine that it’s also possible to find the culprit very soon, or to not find enough evidence on time, and perhaps then the game is less satisfying. But for me it all clicked, even if I never found out why the murderer had murdered my brother.
There’s not a lot more to say, perhaps; this was not a game with super memorable characters or writing or thematic things to say. But it did what it set out to do and did it very well.
I wasn’t too into the other cottagecore game in this competition, but Eikas worked better for me. I think there were two reasons for that. First, Eikas is more interested in telling a coherent story with developing characters and relationships. Second, it gave me a serious challenge to sink my teeth into: become the best possible community chef! Or at least the good-enough community chef.
So I started exploring the game world. It seemed fairly obvious that I should make snacks every day to maximise income; in a dig at the effectiveness of charitable giving, the much-touted gift box never gives you more than a pittance and usually not even that. I used the first money to buy all the seeds available, because that made economic sense. (And if only I had realised that ‘roses 3/3’ did not mean that I had already decorated the room, I would have had a nice first community dinner. But I didn’t, and only later on realised that you had to click that link in order to make decoration happen.) It was a bit repetitive, a bit like grinding, but it was okay, and it also wasn’t long before I had been able to buy all the cookbooks.
And I had enough time to explore the world and meet the characters. This is actually the most interesting part of the game, the four storylines that anchor you to real people in the game world. They also tie into the cooking: each of the three main NPCs has a favourite meal you can make for them, and each of them teaches you to forage for one special ingredient needed for a extra high quality dish. This is all well-done, with nice characters and good writing. If I have a complaint, it is that things started to feel mechanical after a while. Each relationship develops in the exact same way, going through the exact same beats with the exact same challenges and rewards. It would have been nice to switch things up a bit, because now the characters turned into game mechanics. (“When is he going to teach me to fish?” I was wondering, days before fictional me learned that the guy liked fishing. “What gift will he give me to put in my bedroom?”)
My other complaint is… yeah, I guess I’m just going to complain about cottage core again. The complaint is that there is no friction. I meet these people, and all of them are transformed in a good way by being with me for a month. I make food, and the community comes together. There’s no dramatic tension. The game tries to generate tension through the star system and the idea that I’m only on probation; and early on this works; but it quickly turns out to be so easy that the last ten days you are just biding your time until you’ve reached the end, all the relationships already at full stars, your pantry fully stocked, and your confirmation as community chef a foregone conclusion. Emotionally, I wasn’t really invested in any of it, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I’m in a world where all trouble is in the past, and none of it is the present, let alone in the future.
That said, this was a fun game, and easy to recommend for people who want something light but substantial. I wonder what meal that corresponds to?
Thank you very much for the review, and I’m so glad you enjoyed it!
For anyone else reading this: the command to turn the link bar off is LINKS OFF, and SETTINGS tells you this as well as the other options (like HINTS OFF, STATUS OFF, and NOTIFY OFF). I probably should have suggested that command better!
Nope, it’s bad terminology on my part—LINKS ON/OFF controls the link bar, the inline links always appear unless disabled at the interpreter level (in the menu at the top right).
Maybe I should make a bugfix release that changes the command to LINK BAR ON/OFF or adds it as a synonym…
The game explains British traffic rules; and there’s a map; and I’ve actually driven a car from Dover to Exeter and back, and into Dartmoor as well, and that’s not even counting the many hours I spent on a bike in and around Cambridge when I was a visiting PhD student there; and still I kept having driving-on-the-right-side-of-the-road thoughts. ‘But why don’t I first go to the roundabout and then get to the other side of the road that way?’ Oh no, wait.
Turn Right is a urban horror story – okay, not really – about having to cross a road and turn right while the traffic is atrocious. The local traffic planning also seems to be atrocious, because nobody should be required to cross a four-lane road that way in order to get to their destination! But we have to, and adding to the horror is the fact that our driver is extremely self-conscious and afraid of inserting themselves forcefully into the traffic. Especially when the traffic was standing still because of the traffic lights, it seemed to me that they could have taken a more pro-active stance to get through. But there were times when I myself was also a very hesitant driver, so I’m not here to blame them.
To be honest, the game didn’t really click for me. You just type ‘turn right’ over and over, and over, and over, and the game keeps throwing problems at you. But you don’t have to solve them. You just keep typing ‘turn right’. That’s mildly funny, but after a while I kind of stopped reading with full attention because, well, I knew I just had to repeat the command ‘turn right’. Maybe I completely missed the real game. Maybe I should have tried other commands. But I just repeated ‘turn right’, and in the end, it worked.
So maybe the point is that mindless patience will be rewarded? Or that it won’t?
Okay, I’m calling it quits! I know that there’s still a few more days of competition left, but playing and reviewing 43 games in six weeks has taken a toll on me.
Not because of the games – I’m glad to have played them, even the ones I was perhaps less enthusiastic about – but because it has made me physically very tired. It’s good for me to end the evening with a book on the couch; it helps me go to bed on time and sleep well. It’s a lot less good for me to end the evening behind my computer; I tend to go to bed way too late and also sleep less well. I’ve been living too much in a haze of tiredness recently. (And I’m afraid that also shows in the later reviews, which are shorter and more perfunctory.)
Sorry if I didn’t get to your game! There were a still a few on my must-check-out list. But perhaps I’ll get to them after the competition.
Thanks to all the authors! I enjoyed some of the games immensely. And even if I’ve been critical, I’m happy that you made something and put it out there for all of us to talk about and learn from. IFComp is awesome.
