Wolfbiter reviews IFComp 2024 - latest: Eikas; wrap-up

today’s theme, courtesy of the rng-gods: two games with minimalist approaches to cover art

Forbidden Lore by Alex Crossley
Playtime: 47 minutes

The one where: you poke around in a library and learn that a good book can take you anywhere.

I’m a big fan of the concept of this game (mild spoilers, you’re in your late grandfather’s library—which is chock full of books, artifacts, a parrot, etc.—and as you explore you come to realize everything you need is right there in the room with you).

The writing is perfectly serviceable. I was impressed that all of the fantasy names sounded pretty good (hard!), and there are some pretty funny moments:

For a one-room game, there’s a surprising amount of interaction and conferring with the parrot and the bust was well coded and relatively expansive.

I found I was taking RESEARCH NOTES on my in-game reading (which I enjoyed doing), so it was pretty successful in conjuring that “all-nighter in the library except it’s incredibly productive” vibe. Very much channeling the research montage from say a TV show where our teen protagonists go into the spooky library to learn about the old gods, etc.

This game has a lot of promise but could use another round of polish / quality-of-life features to put it over the top.

The parser struggled to disambiguate similar objects:

A few of the commands are so basic that it’s surprising when they work (“shoot fire at priests”).

And the game doesn’t do a great job coping with the fact that the player’s order of exploration is arbitrary and going to differ (e.g., I managed to go destroy the evil statue pretty early, before I understood why I was trying to destroy it, which was confusing and ended up sending me into the walkthrough). I think this game would really benefit from something like a “think” or “reflect” command that tracks the player’s current objectives (like, it could start with “discover what your grandfather was concerned about” and at some point update to “prevent invasion from the sky” and “prevent invasion from below” etc etc as appropriate). I was glad that there was a walkthrough though.

Front matter
Could better set the table for the game Successfully sets the table for the game Successfully sets the table for the game PLUS

Since one of the pleasures of the game is doing research in the expansive library, it might be good to cue that element in the blurb. (As is, it’s a bit ambiguous if the focus of the game is exploring the library or something else [wandering around a different location?])

Overall, a fun promising adventure in a library, with some rough edges

Gameplay tips / typos
  • This is one of those games where SEARCH yields different results than EXAMINE
  • This is in the hints but it should perhaps be upfront—you can examine each bookcase separately and you can look for books on specific topics to read
  • sometimes you have to ask the same question repeatedly (it will yield different results)
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