Ratings and Reviews by EJ

"Swigian" is an Old English word meaning "pause", and this story indeed takes place during a pause or lacuna in a more famous tale. I quickly figured out what story I was in, though nailing down specifics took a little longer thanks to the mysterious and laconic presentation.

You play as an individual who is far from home and trying to get back, along the way searching for food and protection and trying to avoid enemies referred to only as "them". Location descriptions are spare and evocative, supplemented by moody pixel art, and most items don't have particular descriptions. They "are what they are", which quickly trains you not to spend too much time looking at your surroundings. You have to keep moving, after all. Otherwise they might find you.

The puzzles are simple, which along with the sparse text makes this a quick play, but it is surprisingly long on atmosphere, supported by the strange and dreamlike nature of some of the actions you must take. As a literature nerd, I enjoy an unusual and creative retelling of a classic, and this certainly qualifies. The little episodes where surreal things happen for mysterious reasons also give an authentic feeling of reading an old epic or a fairytale, something with an internal logic not quite of this time and place.

The Plant is a classic puzzlefest, of a substantial length few modern games try to match. The PC is a nameless corporate drone who, along with their boss Mr. Teeterwaller, is on their way to an offsite meeting when their car breaks down. This leaves them in the right place at the right time to witness an apparent heist of a bunch of trucks with mysterious, radioactive contents, and the conspiracy-minded, UFO-hunting Mr. Teeterwaller is determined to investigate the plant where they've been taken.

The puzzles are well-implemented, if not always especially diegetically sensible. (It's very convenient that (Spoiler - click to show)the garage door opener that was in the glove compartment of a secondhand car happens to go to the garage of someone who lives near where your car broke down, and especially convenient that the owner of the garage happens to have a catalogue of barcodes for commercial products that somehow also provides you the information you need to open the plant's gate.) I rarely struggled with the parser, and while some of the solutions were a little off-the-wall, it was mostly in a charming way and not "how the heck was I supposed to guess THAT?" My favorite puzzle was the language puzzle early on, and I wish there had been more occasions later that required the use of Blottnian verbs. (Although this is also the only place where I ran into issues with the syntax: I tried (Spoiler - click to show)SAY [VERB] TO DOG and DOG, [VERB] before realizing that what it wanted was just the bare verb.)

But I did feel that once I got into the plant, I was mostly just solving puzzles because the puzzles were there without a strong idea of what my goal was, which turns out to be because Mr. Teeterwaller has a goal in mind but doesn't really tell you what it is until you reach it. Which is symptomatic of the biggest problem I had with the game: it essentially divided main-character status between the PC and Mr. Teeterwaller in ways that did not make much sense to me.

Mr. Teeterwaller is the one who is interested in breaking into the plant; he's the one who has a goal, he's the one who is eventually revealed to have a backstory that ties into the larger plot. But mechanically, he doesn't do anything; you can interact with him a little, but it's never necessary. He just follows you around and occasionally apes your actions (you put on a hard hat, he puts on a hard hat), and when he's not doing that, the game cycles between a small handful of default messages that are entertaining at first but quickly turn into white noise. There's also no real reason given for why he needs you to do everything, not even a strong characterization element of, say, him being the kind of guy who won't do anything himself when he could delegate. Meanwhile, the PC seems to have no particular interest in the situation and on a story level is just being dragged around by Mr. Teeterwaller, but of course by virtue of being the PC, they are the one who takes every single meaningful action in the game--up to and including making the big final choice that determines what ending you get, even though they're not the one who's invested in the outcome.

So we end up with this situation where narratively, Mr. Teeterwaller is the sole driver of the plot, but mechanically, the PC is occupying that role despite the fact that there isn't really a reason for them to do that. While playing, I wondered sometimes why Mr. Teeterwaller wasn't the PC, but maybe a distinct, eccentric character as a PC was a little too spicy for 1998. (I know Tapestry is said to have come out of r.a.if discussions of whether you could have a PC with a distinct personality and that was 1996--but that's at least attempting to be an arty story-game, so maybe the idea that a puzzlefest could have a distinct character as a protagonist was not yet accepted. Though I could be wrong; it's not like I was around then.)

But of course, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything that could reasonably have been done differently at the time. When I reached the end of the game, I was interested to see that it has some "bonus materials", including extensive author's notes about the writing choices and some deleted scenes. The author mentions that Mr. Teeterwaller was a late addition, and that before that he had had another scene that provided the PC more direct motivation to infiltrate the plant. Reading the associated deleted scene, I couldn't help feeling that sticking with that first idea would have been a stronger choice. The PC would have still been pretty firmly a blank slate, but them being told (Spoiler - click to show)"These guys just stole some nuclear weapons, go disable them before they nuke the world" unifies motivation and action in a single character in a way that having a tag-along Mr. Teeterwaller urge you to get into the plant for unclear reasons doesn't.

In any case, though, the bonus materials were very interesting and I loved having the opportunity to see them; it's generally the kind of thing that would often be included in a postmortem, but given the game's release date it's highly unlikely this stuff would still be accessible had it not been included in the game itself.

I do think that this is a good choice for people who want a meaty old-school puzzler to sink their teeth into, and I can see why it's well-regarded on IFDB! But personally I place a lot of value on characterization and on harmony between gameplay and story, and those elements of The Plant didn't quite work for me.

A Murder in Fairyland is a mystery game in which you play as a sorceress who gets stuck in Fairyland when the titular murder, of a candidate for the Autumn Throne, leads to travel restrictions (though probably not for the reasons you'd expect). Upon petitioning the Summer Queen, Titania, for permission to leave, the PC is graciously granted the opportunity (as the fairies would have it) to investigate the crime. This is complicated not by the typical issue of everyone trying to hide anything that might make them seem suspicious, but by all the other candidates claiming credit--being seen to have killed a powerful fairy will increase their political clout. Unfortunately for the PC, this isn't actually any easier to untangle.

The game, which takes place in the universe of Corfman's Open Sorcery games, is as deftly written as one might expect from the author. I always love a humorous juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic, and this game certainly delivers on that. One early puzzle, for example, sees you filing an ADA complaint to get a ramp installed so you can get into the palace (as the PC is a wheelchair user); the complaint form both needs to know the alignment of the ley line beneath the palace and inexplicably asks multiple times about whether the violation occurred in Yonkers. Meanwhile, you also have to unscramble some of the PC's memories to gain access to a certain spell, and these memory portions are written in a more poetic style that is lyrical and evocative. I might recommend this more to fans of 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald's than to fans of The Absence of Miriam Lane, but certainly Corfman's talent for snarky urban fantasy humor and her ability to work in a more literary vein are both on display here. My only quibble about the writing is that the magic-as-programming conceit of the Open Sorcery series, which I remember as being fairly central to the original Open Sorcery game, is so peripheral here as to barely come up, which means that players not familiar with the setting may find the few mentions that exist to be extraneous and perhaps incongruous.

This brings me to the main downside of this game, in my view. A Murder in Fairyland is, as far as I can tell, intended to both function as a standalone and be a promo for Open Sorcery: Sea++ (with which it shares a protagonist), and these two goals are somewhat in tension. While playing Murder I had the persistent feeling that I was playing a demo (albeit a very substantial one). Worldbuilding aside, this mostly isn't due to the writing; the story is pretty self-contained and resolves in a satisfying way (or at least, it can if your investigation is successful). It's more the gameplay that gives this impression. There are a whole lot of mechanics introduced and then barely used: the initial puzzle that you would think would be the one that teaches you the basics so that the mechanic can be used for more complex puzzles later turns out to be the only time that mechanic ever comes up. This is true, for example, of unscrambling memories to compile spells and using elemental motes to affect your environment. There's also a word search mechanic that looks at first as if it's going to be a large part of the game but vanishes completely before you even get to the murder investigation bit. So it feels like most of those things exist to give you a taste of what the "full" game is like, rather than actually playing an integral role in A Murder in Fairyland as a standalone game.

And I admit that I feel like this made the game a little harder and more frustrating for me at times. On the one hand, the one-off mechanics felt a little less intuitive for being one-offs; on the other, the diversity of mechanics in the intro portion kept me from really getting into the mindset of "what form can I use to solve this problem?" that would have been useful for the main investigative portion. (Yes, solving the mystery mainly requires becoming well acquainted with fairy bureaucracy.) I appreciated the in-game hints provided by one of the PC's spells (this is what got me through the one-off elemental motes puzzle), but these aren't available in every situation, so for the other puzzle I got legitimately stuck on (as opposed to the one where I had just overlooked something very obvious, which is completely on me), I had to look elsewhere. I did find what I needed in the comments of Autumn's review, but it was disheartening to click on the official hints file and have it basically just tell me that I can skip all the puzzles if I want to. Which, sure, but I didn't actually want to skip over the most interesting parts of the game! I just wanted a little nudge in the right direction!

All this being said, I did enjoy the game more than I didn't; the mystery portion is well designed and I got most of the evidence I needed without any outside help. I also spent an inordinate amount of time on the tarot-based set-building minigame that refuses to explain its rules to you, which is exactly the kind of thing my brain loves to gnaw on. In case anyone needs the Chaos motes but is not so inclined to spend a lot of time puzzling out the rules, here's what I figured out about scoring:

Overall, A Murder in Fairyland is an enjoyable game that I would recommend to fans of mystery games, funny urban fantasy, and/or Corfman's other work. Just don't get too attached to those early-game mechanics.