Dr Ludwig and the Devil by SV Linwood
How did Ludwig ever attain his doctorate? Victor Frankenstein never graduated, being a failure at university for having too much interest in the likes of Agrippa and not enough in modern science. And Ludwig is a far more eccentric character than poor Victor ever was! To be sure, his other literary predecessor, Faust, was a bona fide doctor and university lecturer; but Faust would never have stooped to digging up bodies in the graveyard. Faust is more into… well, yes… come to think of it, Faust, the Goethe version that is, is one of the most bizarre and least summarisable books I’ve ever read, and thinking these thoughts makes me want to reread it. (Doesn’t Faust escape from the devil because Mephistopheles is momentarily distracted by sexy angel buttocks?)
Our Dr. Ludwig would never exclaim in such existential despair. He is a mad scientists of the early horror movie variety, here to bring corpses back to life, make deals with the devil, get rid of pitchfork-waving mobs, and, of course, laugh in the very face of God. I think we have to imagine this whole game being shot in black and white, perhaps German expressionist style.
Dr Ludwig and the Devil is a comic parser puzzler, and it is very good at what it does. The implementation is top-notch, not just from a technical perspective, but also in the sense that many non-necessary actions receive responses that are not merely appropriate, but funny. One feels at every point that the author had fun getting every possibly laugh out of the formula, and one cannot help but join in the fun. It helps that the tone is excellently chosen – mad scientists zaniness, yes, but incongruous daily life elements liberally mixed in – and that the writing is very strong. Here’s a paragraph from the opening text:
This is strong, but it’s the last line that makes it very strong; the perfectly executed contrast between the mad scientist prose and the all-too-quotidian and utilitarian “advancing the sum total of human knowledge” shows that we are in the hands of a writer we can trust. (If I want to be extremely critical, I’d say that you can advance human knowledge, but that you enlarge its sum total. But very few people would notice this in reading. I only noticed it after copy-pasting the passage to single it out for praise!)
Dr Ludwig turns out to be a surprisingly fun character to inhabit. Yes, he is a mad scientist willing to summon the devil, but he is also very human, feeling attracted to the unlettered, muscular, naive Hans (I somehow feel that their shared future will include Lederhosen) and being unwilling to damn his soul. He is also something of a trickster character, which the mad scientist usually is not. Not only does he manage to trick the devil several times, but – and this was an especially nice touch – he even cheats his way through the recipe, every single ingredient that he obtains fulfilling only the letter but never the spirit of the recipe. This presages how we deal with the devil’s contract.
At the end, Ludwig gets ‘a cookie of his own dough’, as we say in Dutch, when the devil starts using this trick against him.
But you can’t beat Ludwig at his own game.
I got stuck a few times with the puzzles, though I suppose I might have solved them myself with a bit more time. One hard spot seemed to be the place where I had to ask the devil about vacations, but this wasn’t even listed as a topic (even though I had already talked about vacations to the shopkeeper). I can easily imagine getting permanently stuck there.
Brian Rushton (Mathbrush) has a theory that IFComp is usually won by a smooth, comic parser game. On the basis of that theory, and even without it, Dr Ludwig seems a serious contender for this year’s prize, because it is exactly the kind of game that Brian is talking about. (I’ll just add the big caveat that there are few enough IFComp votes that random factors play a huge role in the final ranking.)