Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade
You know what’s my thing? 17th century opera! Okay, I admit that that’s overselling it. In no way am I an expert about 17th century opera, nor do I listen to it that much. I’ve been listening to Vivaldi’s operas lately, and that’s more early 18th century. But I do put on Monteverdi with some regularity, and the Spotify playlist that came with Fantasy Opera: Mischief at the Masquerade was right up my alley.
This is the second game by Lamp Post Projects that I’m playing in this competition, and it’s easy to recognise the similarities to the other one, The Path of Totality. There is the slick interface; there are the really nice hand-drawn character portraits; there’s a general atmosphere of niceness; and there is optional romance. But they’re also very different games. Fantasy Opera is a detective game. There’s a real crime afoot, and so there’s a dastardly opponent with an evil plan, which means that the general atmosphere of niceness is much more circumscribed. I enjoyed the tensions this brought more than the more laid-back approach of the other game. There were also random dice rolls in an RPG style skill check system, including protection against save scumming. (Yes, I tried.)
As players, we have to solve the crime before it is committed, and this requires us to piece together the puzzle pieces and formulate a hypothesis. I liked the set-up, but found the implementation didn’t quite work. (Major spoilers start in the next sentence.) I had realised exactly who was going to commit the crime, and how, and why. The one thing that I wasn’t entirely sure about was who was going to be robbed; none of the evidence I had found seemed to specify this. But since I had some evidence that the criminal might resent the duchess, I chose ‘the duchess’ and the victim of the crime. Now when I tried out this hypothesis, the game would tell me not that I lacked evidence about the intended victim, but that I lacked evidence about how the criminal wanted to use the instrument. But I didn’t! I knew that part of the story perfectly! This stumped me, and I resorted to ‘casting a magic spell’ – after which, yes, of course, I reloaded my save and proceeded. But the feedback given by the game should be different in situation such as this.
Nevertheless, this hardly impacted by enjoyment. Fantasy Opera is a fun game, based on serious knowledge of historical opera performance, and I’d happily recommend it.
(Merely parenthetically, I do wonder after these two games what the point of the ‘fantasy species’ is? They all seem to be, well, extremely human? We are given no story about social structures of oppression or exclusion that would make it logical to introduce non-human characters for story reasons. Surely they’re not just there for the pointy ears and tusks and other bits of cosmetics? But I can’t think of anything that would change about either Fantasy Opera or The Path of Totality if everyone were turned into a human.)