Ratings and Reviews by EJ

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The writing here is spare but effective, and the simplicity of it makes sense for a protagonist in this kind of survival situation. I appreciated the little looks we get at the protagonist’s personality and history; they are someone who once had big dreams and has been ground down by life, only for a dream to come true in a situation where they cannot at all appreciate it. There are little bits of pathos to it all—the ship named after your mother’s, the radio you can’t afford to fix—but most prominently the PC comes off as tired. They’ve been through a lot, and now something that should be an awe-inspiring experience is just one more thing to deal with.

The game also takes its opportunities to throw in details that make the alien craft feel truly alien—the interiors of enamel rather than metal, the unpleasant color that’s somewhat outside the human-visible spectrum, the mysterious darkness. Even the way they name celestial bodies suggests some complex system that we don’t know enough to understand. It makes sure that what should feel unfamiliar does, which is an important thing for any first-contact type of narrative.

It is definitely a puzzle-forward game with narrative, prose, and characterization as flavoring; the PC’s personal journey isn’t taking center stage here. But it’s effective flavoring, and very tasty.

Playability

I’m biased on this one as a multilingual person, dabbler in linguistics, and lover of language puzzles; I think I had an easier time of it than many people did. But I did like the language puzzle a lot and felt a lot of joy and excitement when getting a new word or finding a new instance of a word I’d seen before that helped me nail down its meaning.

I think the way the puzzles escalated made a lot of sense and I felt triumphant and smart at various moments when solving them. The thing that tripped me up was nothing so difficult as the language, but rather just your basic adventure game stuff. I got stuck for an inordinately long time at the red door, because the game said (Spoiler - click to show)(roughly translated) “turn coil to open red door”, but I was convinced I had to (Spoiler - click to show)touch the coil to the red door or somehow stick it in the red door, and none of the commands I tried to use to make that happen worked, and the hints were of no help… but then, is this the game’s fault if it told me in so many words what to do and I didn’t try (Spoiler - click to show)TURN COIL? Then at the end, I figured out (Spoiler - click to show)what message I needed to send with the device but didn’t realize I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)scan stuff to send it as opposed to speaking it or putting it into the device somehow, and spent a while spinning my wheels on that. Is that the game’s fault? Could it have stopped me from being an idiot? I’m not sure. But it did reduce my feelings of playfulness, whatever that’s worth.

Regardless of my idiosyncratically stupid experiences, from chatter during the play period I get the impression that the puzzles were pitched a little too hard for the average IF player and the hints weren’t quite the ones people needed at times, but I think this is something that would have easily been fixed if playtesting had been feasible.

Design

This game was extensively taking advantage of the abilities of Dialog. The interface for adding or changing translations was easy to use and I was happy to be playing a game in a system that could have that mechanic instead of requiring typing for all of that (or just making you keep track of it by hand). The automap isn’t really a necessity in this small of a game, but it’s a nice convenience.

It also uses options Dialog has for visual styling, with the inclusion of the cover image and light and dark mode CSS. The color schemes mostly look nice and fit the vibe of the game.

(Note: In light mode, the link text/background contrast is a little too low. I think the background could just be lightened a little and that would fix it—that’s what I did with Stylebot, anyway. A very understandable issue, though—I’ve done the same thing when trying to put together two color schemes in a hurry.)

In general, it’s just really identifiably a Dialog game, and for a less-used authoring system I think that’s very cool to see.

The puzzle design is also something the chef discussed during the process, and I think their planning for how to establish, build on, and then twist the puzzle mechanics shows through in the finished product—even if some of the puzzles could benefit from more scaffolding I think the basic structure of puzzle progression is good.

Inventiveness

Endymion clearly owes a lot to its forbears in the “translation game” genre, but it’s worth noting that this is a genre that has very few entries to date. I remember when I finished Heaven’s Vault (before Chants of Sennaar came out), I went looking for recommendations for similar games, and the recommendations were very sparse (and one of them, Tork, is no longer playable anyway). I also think the way that Endymion marries the language puzzle aspect to adventure game puzzling (decipher these messages to learn exactly how you should be manipulating these medium dry goods!) is fairly unusual—it has its forerunners in things like The Gostak but there’s nothing quite like it as far as I’m aware.

The premise of the spaceship crash in a remote location is an old one, in IF and elsewhere (actually, is it meaningfully distinct as a trope from the sea-shipwreck in a remote location, do we think?). But I do think that the goal being communication in an alien language gives the story a different core from many such stories, where the PC might repair the spaceship or devise some other clever method of escaping their situation. It’s a little less about self-reliance and a little more about striving for connection. (Or maybe it’s just about how aliens are cool??? I’m sorry, I have to get on my litcrit BS sometimes, otherwise what did I waste all that time in college for.)

Challenge Ingredient

It’s hard to imagine a dish more suffused with its challenge ingredient than this one. Both the device itself, as a physical object, and the nonhuman language of its messages are absolutely central to every puzzle in the game, as well as to the story overall. It’s integral, you could say, to both the “interactive” and the “fiction” pieces. Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider is a game about a fairy and a weird machine and, well, an ancient treasure and a secret spider, and Endymion is a game about a device that emits messages in a nonhuman language. What more can I say?

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The narrative voice of the fairy is very strong, and every parser response I saw was infused with it. She (I assume, because “every other fairy you have ever met also thinks the same of herself” implies every fairy is a “she”—though perhaps they just use the generic feminine?) is an unreliable narrator in the way that matters most to IF, which is that she doesn’t understand or accurately report on her surroundings, but she’s also not a very reliable reporter of her own feelings, adding some layer of bluster to anything that might get too personal. It’s not that she wants to attract Lind’s attention, it’s that she knows fate has ordained that she do so. It’s not that being kept in a pocket with the corpses of her fellows for ages has been traumatic or even upsetting, it’s just that it’s dented her cheerful disposition slightly. Everything she says has to be scrutinized a bit for what’s really going on.

When it comes to the NPCs, the clear standout is the stranger. At first he seems sinister, and that’s not entirely inaccurate; he does eat fairies, who are sapient creatures, and torments them (however obliviously) by keeping them captive first. But ultimately he’s looking for love, and he’s willing to risk being devoured for it, and this wins the fairy’s sympathies in the end. Trala and Lind, meanwhile, are more stock characters who never get very much depth, but this works fine for the arc of the fairy’s imagined alignment with them (when they have not even noticed her) vs. her actual alignment with the stranger (whom she actually speaks to in her own voice at the end, a rare occurrence).

The setting has often been one of the major pleasures of Pacian’s game, and in this one-room game we get a lot less of that, but I appreciate the flavoring of the D&D-style high fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi. It’s familiar enough to be gestured to quickly instead of spelled out in more depth, with enough zest to keep it from seeming like something you’ve seen a million times before.

Playability

The game plays very smoothly for the most part—it’s hard to get hung up for too long, mostly thanks to its one-verb conceit, which makes the puzzles come down to figuring out what things are based on what details you can get from the fairy’s descriptions and the noises of the mysterious device. Once you’ve twigged to what’s what, there’s no additional step to figure out how to execute what you need to do. Nothing is too complex, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

I did find that as the game went on and the number of doohickeys, whatsits, and thingummies mounted, it became difficult to keep track of what was what, and I wished that the game had been designed to take already-used items out of play, or had some other mechanic to limit the amount of time a player can spend combing through the stranger’s pocket examining everything to try to remember which name goes with what characteristics.

The other part of the game I struggled with a bit was the final sequence on the platform, where I had to figure out the means of searching the treasure pile for a specific thing. This takes on a sort of (Spoiler - click to show)telescoping Lime Ergot mechanic that hasn’t appeared before; it works well, but did take me a few frustrated moments to even think to attempt. It’s hard to get out of the groove, right at the end, of a game whose puzzles have otherwise all worked one way. So if more varied mechanics are going to be present, probably best to introduce them earlier. But it didn’t hold me up for too terribly long.

There is an in-game hint system, which I perhaps should have tried for the sake of the evaluation, but I didn’t end up needing it in general–which is a compliment to the puzzle design, at least!

Design

The game’s puzzle design mostly feels solid and unified, other than the last-minute introduction of a different puzzle type. Outside of that part, the puzzles refined on the same single concept and flowed nicely one into the next.

There’s thematic resonance, as well, between the gameplay of attempting to decipher the surroundings by piecing together information from two people (beings?) with an incomplete understanding of them and the thread of loneliness and frustrated communication attempts that runs through the game.

The game also has a tendency to set up and then immediately puncture well-worn tropes, such as the monstrous enemy being revealed to be a corrupted form of humans or a humanlike species, or the good old “lost technology of the ancients” (they don’t make machines like this anymore… because they make them much smaller now). This is always a solid source of humor and keeps things fun for jaded types like me who have perhaps consumed too much genre fiction for their own good. (Of course, frequently-used tropes can still be done well; it’s all in the execution. But when you have little space for that execution, sometimes a quick humorous nod is the right choice.)

Showing off the unique affordances of Dialog was not perhaps so much a focus here; I do understand that it makes a one-verb game easier to put together in this short time and saves a lot of effort getting rid of default responses, but I do feel like “it makes it easier to limit its capabilities” maybe leaves less of an impression than showing off what it can do.

Inventiveness

Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider definitely felt fresh and unusual to me in a lot of ways. I can’t quite think of a good comparison point for its figuring-out-what-things-are-based gameplay (Where Nothing Is Ever Named, maybe? But it’s certainly not a crowded field). I also can’t say I’ve encountered many interdimensional spiders in trenchcoats pretending to be human in IF or elsewhere.

The PC did feel very Tinkerbell-esque, as Pacian tacitly acknowledged, but to get that kind of character as a protagonist is somewhat unusual. (I personally can’t name any other works from the point of view of a Tinkerbell expy, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it’s something.)

The setting is perhaps the least original aspect, spiders and passing trope-subversions aside, but it’s a one-room game, which makes setting harder to convey, so it’s more that it would have been impressive if it did manage to evoke a unique setting than that it’s disappointing that it didn’t.

Challenge Ingredient

The device held by the stranger—which seems to tell him things about his environment, albeit in a way not quite so straightforward as saying the names of objects it’s pointed at—is central to (most of) the gameplay, providing information to supplement the fairy’s limited perception of her surroundings. The nonhumanness of the language may not necessarily matter, but the nonhumanness of the spider matters (to his motivations, to our interpretation of his character), so I’d say that aspect of the ingredient is not neglected.

The ingredient is, however, just that little bit shy of being fundamental to the dish. You could have had almost the same game if the spider were just chittering to himself when he looked at different objects. But it’s still an excellent use of the ingredient.

The Galaxy Jones games are a pulpy sci-fi series starring an action heroine with a super-suit, some sort of an energy weapon, and the grit necessary to take on any space-age threat. My experience with the first game was a bit of a mixed bag. I remember the delight I felt whenever I got a point and got the ASCII logo, but I also remember a certain amount of wrestling with the parser.

In this entry, our heroine is on a mostly-deserted space station that the Siriusians, a group of alien cyborgs, is about to use to launch Phobos into Mars (I think?) to strike a blow against the humans in what appears to be an ongoing war between them. This at first makes the Siriusians seem like straightforward villains, but documents you find throughout the game add nuance—once you can read them, that is.

I enjoyed running around the space station, hoovering up Siriusian text for my translator doohickey, and then going back to reread things as the words gradually filled in. I also enjoyed the first few door puzzles, which are an unusual variant on the “Lights Out” puzzle type—I have never loved Lights Out, to be honest, but it turned out that (Spoiler - click to show)instead of being about spatial reasoning these were about math, which I found easier to get to grips with. I took notes, I figured out patterns, I felt smart.

Then I ran into a door that required something else entirely, and that I didn’t manage to figure out. What I needed to do just wasn’t really intuitive to me, and I would have liked more of a nudge in that direction. But you can use literal brute force to bypass any door, and so I did that just to keep the game moving… only to immediately get hung up on a new type of puzzle that couldn’t be bypassed that way. That one I managed to solve on my own after sleeping on it, but having my momentum killed that way such that I had to walk away from the game for a day was a bit of a downer. At this length I much prefer to play a game in one sitting. So I really wished there were somewhere I could have turned, not to have the solution handed to me, but just for a bit of a hint.

The portion after that puzzle also went smoothly and I did win the game (although with so few turns to spare that I didn’t try for the two optional non-door points, which I might return to later). On the whole I would say that I had a good time, especially with everything up to the blue door, and the implementation was very smooth—at no point did I think “I know what I need to do, but I don’t know what I need to type to do it.” But while I understand the diegetic hints of the previous game may not work in this context, a hint system of some sort would have taken this from very good to excellent.

Backpackward is about a put-upon wage slave who finds that when he wears his trusty backpack, the cellar at his neighbor Jan’s house turns into a portal to a medieval fantasy world. The main mechanic is inventory management, with the unusual-for-IF twist that this is basically a spatial reasoning puzzle; there are pixel graphics for the backpack and all the things you can put in it and you can rotate the items around to try to pack them in as efficiently as possible. It’s distinctive and smoothly implemented and the graphics look nice.

The writing, though, I have mixed feelings about. The game’s blurb promises a PC with “anger management issues” who experiences “no emotional growth”, so it feels a little gauche to then complain about him. I have looked into the bag labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat”, and guess what, there was a dead dove in there. But look, it’s not that I’m against comedies where the point is to watch terrible people suffer the consequences of their own actions, it’s just, did it have to be a stereotypical nerd who’s weird about women and a little bit casually homophobic? I’m kind of tired of that guy as a protagonist, even when he’s mostly the butt of the joke. Maybe I would feel differently if the main fantasy-world female character didn’t fawn over him. (Of course, she has ulterior motives… which have to do with feeling insecure because her sister was forced into marriage by the evil ruler and not her. I’m not sure that’s better?)

That said, the writing is often legitimately funny, if often also mean-spirited with it. I enjoyed the description of the PC’s manager as a girl who “consists mostly of goth eyeliner”, for example, and the Jansport/Jan’s portal pun is groanworthy in the way one wants puns to be (if you like puns at all, of course). Also, the game did seem enjoyably responsive to having different combinations of items in your backpack—the differences are pure flavor most of the time, but I’m of the opinion that that’s a perfectly fine way to do IF.

So I do think there’s a lot to like about Backpackward, but the choice to have a funny-misogynist protagonist is not my favorite to start with, and when you put him in a narrative whose broader choices are just sexist in an unexamined kind of way, it becomes hard to tell what’s supposed to just be his opinion. Which is unfortunate.