Have Orb, Will Travel by Older Timer
Playtime: 1 hour (did not finish)
TLDR: A custom environment has been laboriously crafted for you to test your mettle on a series of puzzles.
Gamemechanical notes: Shipped as a separate executable file. Easy to run after downloading. A few notes—definitely start by reading the in-game “help” file, which includes instructions you will likely want like (1) how to turn off mandatory fullscreen and (2) how to take items (yes, really). You can save, no undo. I’m torn about how useful saving would be–I don’t think it’s possible stick yourself in a no-win situation, and generally when I realized a mistake it was more like "oh, I realized a mistake 25 turns ago . . .
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- This game is lush with UI details. Fecund with them! We have sound design (and I really found the sound effects increased immersion, and at times provided useful information about the location). The game client comes with hotkeys for commonly typed commands, OR you can define your own! (Again, consult “help”)
- The first time I read the book, I enjoyed the tactile experience of turning pages one at a time, accompanied by the sound effect
- In another nice touch, all of the game’s description briefly becomes timed text (but not too much so) when you use the ring of slow-down-time
- In general it’s pretty hard to lose the game outright, for example, if you get lost in the forest there’s a kind of funny interlude where the command line disappears and the game walks you back to where you started
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As I mentioned above, there was a lot of thought deployed in this game. The whole custom system was well design and deployed and I appreciate the craft and effort. Ultimately I think the puzzles it was deployed in service of were not for me. As others have mentioned, the puzzles require a lot of “noticing that something you did changed something unexpected in a different location,” and other things that I would describe as finicky. And a lot of them hinge on manipulating a magical artifacts or highly abstract objects (like colored push-buttons), so you are operating without any physical intuitions to help you. This all contributed to a feeling that what was happening was a bit arbitrary, and I was just sort of being buffeted around by it. (And several of the puzzles, like the combination-lock dial, do ask you to guess randomly.) It’s interesting because I definitely don’t think the intent was to torment the player, in fact we get a map of the maze and a clue for the combination lock puzzle that takes it from 1000 options to 64, but I wouldn’t say it felt player-friendly either.
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I found the spell conceit criminally underused. Let me relish being a wizard! Go mad with power, as it were! We do get to learn spells, but the physical environment when you first learn them doesn’t seem to have a single valid target for any of them, so we don’t get that spark-of-joy moment of seeing the effect. Also, after using the spells you have to relearn them from the book again, which is a deterrent to playing around with them.
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This game obviously made the choice to be extremely puzzle-focused, and far be it from me to cast aspersions upon the hoary tradition of puzzlers, but I do think a bit more plot hooks or character work or SOMETHING would have given me more of a reason to persevere with the puzzles