A Warm Reception

This is a sweet, fairly simple game that wasn’t quite what I expected based on the blurb. The mystery is solved via notes you happen upon throughout the castle, and is incidental to the main objective, (Spoiler - click to show)which is collecting items of armor (and possibly a sword) in order to defeat a dragon. It took me only about a half hour to finish, and my playthrough started with this infelicitous exchange:

Castle Entrance
You see the entrance to the castle in the east, and it has been thrown open, with no one inside. The entryway is covered in soot and burn marks. Whatever caused this doesn't seem to be nearby anymore. At your feet is a small booklet with the heading "Instruction Booklet"

>get booklet
That's hardly portable.

>x entryway
You can't see any such thing.

>x marks
You can't see any such thing.

>x soot
You can't see any such thing.

Seeing this game gave me trepidation. Marked 'an hour and a half', parser game, 'Old School', 'Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre', a classic-looking castle on the cover; it had all the markings of some custom-parser windows executable game that is huge and buggy and the author keeps insisting 'The game is easy' or 'You're playing wrong', as has happened in countless past IFComps.

Imagine my relief when:

* The first sentence made me laugh, and
* the game turned out to be fair, well-programmed, and have an adjustable play length.

In this game, you are a reporter assigned to cover a royal wedding. You arrive late (intentionally) to find everyone gone and the castle unusually hot.

This game lets you access the end from the beginning! At any point you can enter the final battle, with a random chance to win based on your overall score. So the game only really lasts as long as you want it.

Gameplay is pretty simple, mostly 'pick up item and use it here'. There are some more complex puzzles; there was one maze I solved halfway but gave up on just because I don't really like mazes. Once I saw the spoilery map, I realized that it wasn't even hard, but such is the fate of weak walkthrough users like myself. The only other hard puzzle was one that I had seen others talking about on here so I knew how to solve.

There were several unimplemented interactions and synonyms.

Overall, the interactions were satisfying and the writing funny. Something felt a bit 'light' about the game, both in puzzles and writing, but what is here seemed good. I do think I ran into a bug or unusual luck, because I was able to beat a luck-based game without rigging it the way the game suggested.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Ah, the life of a fantasy reporter. It’s not all vapid princely press conferences, exposing necromancer corruption, and spotlighting entrenched knightly race-based slaying. Sometimes you get some softball red-carpet celebrity events to just enjoy overengineered hors d’oeuvres and showily old wine. Why not? You’ve earned it hammering out scrolls into the wee hours to meet Editor Rumplestiltskin’s insane deadlines. It’s almost not fair when events go south and it’s up to you to get to the bottom of things.

Like most journalism, it’s one parser based puzzle after another, as you assemble the event’s back story as well as enough armor to challenge the invading dragon. Seriously, why do we even HAVE a Round Table if they can’t be bothered to step up here? What, too busy stopping and frisking orcs to deal with crown excesses? And after all the catapults we’ve integrated into their departments, on our tithe dollars.

The investigation ends up being a very smooth, very low key affair. Its aims are established early and clearly. Most puzzles are signposted clearly enough, with, uh, singposts? A lot of signage and found paper scraps usher you through one armor-dispensing puzzle to the next. Points for clarity, and very much appreciate the anti-cruelty of its challenges. That overt signposting does have a distancing effect on engagement, though. When in-game instructions are aimed so clearly at the player, without camouflaging it (much) in world building or lore, the urgency of the world itself diminishes a bit. This is not necessarily an inherent problem, plenty of games showcase puzzle solving over storytelling. For me, the puzzle design was just a little too light to shoulder that burden, here (though I will shout out to the keypad/maze puzzle, that one required a few moments’ noodling).

The storytelling itself was similarly somewhat shorthanded. It uses the well-worn trope ‘finding important scraps of paper’ to pass on backstory. This is always a compromise in a game - kind of a narrative monologue/infodump. It’s a classic, no doubt about it, but the more successful games either find ways to vary the formula a bit, justify the artifacts narratively, or just plain make them fun to read. Here, they were more functional than anything else, in service of a story with two twists. Neither of them were dramatic crescendos, but amusing enough and of an emotional scale consistent with the rest of the game.

It all added up to a work that was pleasant to play and consume, whose heart was in the right place the whole way, that made the player feel very welcome, but that never really sparked for me. I liked the setup idea, Fantasy Front Page, but in the end the Sword WAS mightier than my quill and that kind of deflated too. If I was gonna slay it anyway why did I need to be a journalist? It seems tailor-made for Knight-aganda. As a work, it never really exceeded the sum of its parts, pleasant as those parts were. Look, you work the castle beat as long as this reporter, you get a bit jaded. You’ve seen too much venality and corruption, the light slice-of-life stuff feels puffy. Maybe as a fresh-faced cub reporter this would’ve landed harder.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 45m, win, score 18/18
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless