The Wise-Woman’s Dog: A Bronze Age Adventure by Daniel M. Stelzer
Flavor: the PC has magic, but lacks thumbs, and must solve puzzles in a richly detailed Bronze Age setting
Playtime: 2 hours (did not finish, felt I was pretty close to finishing)
In the Miss Gosling’s Last Case, the 2024 IFComp outing by Daniel Stelzer, we played as the ghost of a human woman, whose main way of interacting with the world was via instructions to her faithful canine companion. In The Wise-Woman’s Dog, we play directly as an unusually intelligent doggo. (2026 prediction: we play as . . . the ghost of a dog?)
The interface is a bit unique and has features of both a parser and choice-based game. It looked very similar to me to the interface from Miss Gosling’s Last Case, although I didn’t check exhaustively for tweaks. Generally you have a choice of typing your instructions, parser style, or clicking from context dependent links (i.e., an object will suggest contextually-appropriate actions to take with it, like taking it, pushing it, jumping on it). This lets you type if you think it will be faster, but also avoids any getting stuck because you don’t realize you can “turn the knob” or what have you. I found that I mostly clicked, although for navigation-heavy segments typing is faster. I quite enjoyed the interface before and am still a big fan.
I also really liked the minimap at the top of the screen, which lets you travel automatically to previously-visited locations by clicking (except for a few places that are trickier to get to, where the game will make you walk). It also displays context-dependent icons (i.e., “!” seems to indicate you left an item there, “?” seems to indicate there’s a person who you can currently interact with there).
Overall I applaud the care taken in the UI and to try to make it a frictionless playing experience. (Other notable quality-of-life features—as a dog, you can only carry one thing at a time, but there’s a “stash” option which will leave any item where you are, and give you a menu option to return directly later. You can also only have one spell at a time, and similar fetching mechanic is provided).
The main struggle for me, and this may be idiosyncratic, but there was a good portion in the middle-ish of the game where I was exploring the city, and doing things, but I didn’t really know *what* I was trying to accomplish, so I lacked motivation. At some point after that it occurred me (and I kept this impression throughout, but I haven’t finished the game, so hey, caveat lector) that it’s basically a heist game where you play as a dog, in that you’re just supposed to steal everything that’s not nailed down, sell it for money, and the money will allow you to solve the plot). That did give me a lot more direction and I started feeling more motivated, but it took me a while to have that realization.
A few loose ends that I will have to suppress my curiosity about until I finish: (1) I wonder if we’re ever going to be able to do anything with the captivity “blessing”? (2) When I read the description of my collar, I started wondering if the plot was going to involve me getting Flowers For Algernon -ed, although that might be too dark for the tone. (3) if I am indeed going to suffer some kind of cosmic consequence for selling temple goods. I mean it seemed in-character for the dog to take the risk either way, but I’m curious!
And some things I was really vibing with:
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loved the puppy-finding mini-game. Although that somewhat inflated my expectations of how much smelling there would be in the game?
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One of the “but you have heard of me” guys of all time, pretty sure that’s an Ea-Nasir cameo‽ (3,775-year-old spoiler alert).
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the thorough, graduated hints
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the historical facts. I love it when fiction has footnotes, and not just snarky, “another character annotated the text” footnotes (I mean, that’s fine), but like INFORMATIONAL footnotes! I am 100% here for this
Selected quote:
(Also, let’s bring pithoi back! Please, get me a jar so good it’s also a storage bin so good it’s also my coffin.)