No, I surely have not. However, I am excited to try them!
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For reference there is the established Zarfian Cruelty Scale.
There are five defined levels from Merciful to Cruel, the useful part is the rating is based on how well the game notifies the player whether they are stuck unable to reach an optimal ending.
I actually have all the levels entered as tags here if anyone cares to use them in reviews. I’ve prepended the tags like zcs-cruel so if you type “zcs” when entering tags you’ll see them.
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The thing I am working on for Spring Thing has a sandbox approach where none of the objects are neccesary in and of themselves and the only goal is to reach a certain score (which allows the player to trigger the final scenario).
Each player will probably do 3-4 of the game’s 24 ish small item-based puzzles before they beat the game. You can do some really roundabout frustrating things, or you can be very efficient and mostly use items from the first room.
I am interested to see how people respond to it. I think there will be comparisons to Untitled Goose Game but there is probably a closer comparison within IF.
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Another approach that I don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet is what I did in one of my games: the item just automatically (re)appears in the player’s inventory at the appropriate time, unexplained. In practice, I doubt any players trigger this unless they’re intentionally trying to play around with norms (not even my beta testers seemed to notice), so it’s more like an Easter egg than a crime against mimesis.
This is sort of common in choice narratives where there’s not a formal inventory.
The player may encounter a passage “Hey, there’s a wrench here, you stuff it in your pocket.” that sets $wrench = true. Then when the player encounters the rusty bolt later a choice will appear when $wrench eq true “Use the wrench here.”
They may have forgotten that they even have the wrench. I don’t think it’s a crime against mimesis since in this case inventory and experience is narrative rather than object-based.
That’s one major advantage in choice - the author has much more control over the world-state and what the player can and cannot do and it’s possible to not need to futz around with whether the player has the wrench or not since seeing it causes it to be automatically taken.
A fancier implementation may give the player a choice whether to pick up the wrench or not - and then at the location of the rusty bolt the game checks if the player had been in the toolshed but doesn’t have the wrench, then can display a message “You could use a wrench. Hey, wasn’t there one back in that toolshed?”
In parser you could always narrate this also.
TURN BOLT
Hm. You’ll need a wrench. Hey, didn’t you see one back there in the Toolshed?
You scurry back and retrieve it. Now you can turn the bolt…
[behind the scenes, the wrench is automatically added to inventory without the player needing to retrieve it]
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