Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus: Part 1: The City of Dol Bannath by Charles M Ball
Flavor: [in this case the title gives sufficient flavor]
Playtime: 42 minutes
I have a soft spot for a game that—like this one—unapologetically drops you into the premise without any attempt to justify it. Warrior poet is, I take it, a mildly un-trendy course of study at university, and yet after dealing with that the whole time, on the eve of graduation we have been further stymied by Professor Zylock’s abscondment with the Mantablasphere. Rude. Anyhow, we’re off to try to find them.
This game features reasonable puzzles and exploration of a colorful world. I was generally engaged and I enjoyed flouncing around with the PC’s inflated ego, fighting people and looking at the setting. I was also glad to see there was a walkthrough!
The game did a good job setting up rails to direct player exploration. I could wander around enough, but I also general knew where I was supposed to focusing. There was some nice not-to-glaring closing off of options—only making one inn available, showing NPCs but clearly cueing that the prerequisites had not been completed by having them be stated to be unavailable. I also liked a lot of the game’s auto-complete logic, e.g., just telling me directly that I was not going to turn myself in to the guard rather than have me wonder if I was going to accidentally do so through conversation, or I suppose, try futilely to turn myself in. It also looked like there was perhaps a pacifist route provided if you talked to the guard more? (I did not try that.)
The two things that come to mind which would have made me even more pleased would be (1) more combat and harder combat—particularly for a game that gives me this many chances to think about my loadout. I fought 3 people and took a grand total of 1 hp of damage from them, the same amount that I took from a bush. And, (2) although I take it this was an intentional choice aimed at creating anticlimactic humor, I wanted the poetry to be more badass. Our species has been writing poetry for 5 millennia–there are bangers! We can do better than 5 words of Mary Had A Little Lamb! Or to put it another way, when your title starts with “Warrior Poet,” expect that some of your audience will be there for the poetry.
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ETA: transcript
wolfbiter - Warrior Poet transcript - Copy.txt (182.2 KB)