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IFComp version (v2)
Updated version with bug fixes.
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
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by David Welbourn

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Stuff of Legend

by Lance Campbell profile

Fantasy
2020

(based on 21 ratings)
9 reviews

About the Story

The only thing worse than being a village idiot is being an unemployed village idiot.

Maybe it’s time to change careers. Maybe it’s time to be a knight.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Writing; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best NPCs; Nominee - Following the cat through the forest, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee - Sassy Britches, Best Individual NPC; Nominee - Ichabod Stuff, Best Individual PC - 2020 XYZZY Awards

8th Place (tie) - 26th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2020)

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(6)
4 star:
(12)
3 star:
(3)
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Number of Reviews: 9
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Light, playful, entertaining, October 5, 2020
by WidowDido (Northern California)
Related reviews: if comp 2020

A nice parser game with no obvious flaws or bugs on my first playthrough. Probably very good for a newcomer to IF: only about a dozen rooms, not too many items, well-defined goals, and an Invisiclues style hint system if necessary.

For anyone looking for a solid, light-hearted game with a handful of pretty simple puzzles and a bit of humor, there are many worse ways to spend an evening. The interactions between the PC and the NPCs--a village idiot and the family he rents a "room" from--are cute and well written. The first couple puzzles involving animals are not all that challenging, but the responses detailing what the PC is thinking as he solves the puzzles is great.

I wouldn't say the game was exceptional, but the end game does provide a "Did You Try?" list with enough things for me to replay.

A solid IF Comp 2020 entry. Given the tone and genre, it's hard to think of any complaints.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Delightful short IF, October 13, 2021

I've greatly enjoyed playing "Stuff of legend"
It's a delightful, short IF with very funny and logical puzzles, a great humor and well-characterized NPCs.
English is not my mother tongue so I can't judge appropriately the prose, that anyway it seems to me great.
Particulary recommend as a starting point for beginners.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Well-implemented and charming, December 12, 2020
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2020

Stuff of Legend is just the kind of palate-cleanser I love to come across deep in the throes of working through my Comp queue. It isn’t trying to do anything revolutionary with a thought-provoking setting or intensive characterization or teeth-grinding puzzling or pomo narrative trickery; it just delivers a charming, funny, well-designed and well-implemented puzzlefest that doesn’t wear out its welcome, and sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

The setup here doesn’t go much beyond what’s in the blurb: as a village idiot who’s had his fill of idioting after being bullied by a drunken lout (idiots > louts), you limp your way home to the farm where you live. After commiserating with the farm family, you strike upon the idea of become a knight instead of an idiot, and engage in some light puzzling across a medium-sized map, getting outfitted with a knight’s equipment and then embarking on a quest or two (though most of these might be more appropriate to an animal-control officer than a paragon of chivalric valor).

The humor really helps this all land – the writing is full of malapropisms, and there’s lots of scenery and incidental detail that throw off good jokes when examined, though I think my favorite joke was the response to X ME (Spoiler - click to show)(”You have a face like a pile of mashed potatoes and a body like a much taller pile of mashed potatoes”). The player character is a fool, so many of the jokes are formally at your expense, but crucially, neither the narrative voice nor the other characters are ever cruel: they might sigh at your occasional foibles, but it’s all fairly indulgent and supportive, and after getting through the puzzles you’re rewarded with some clear victories. Games with this kind of humor can sometimes come off mean, like they’re not on the player’s side, but SoL never even comes close to hitting this flaw.

The puzzles also strike just the right note. They’re all cleanly set up through conversation with the different members of the family – each has a distinct puzzle chain, and offers some clues as to how to accomplish it. There’s usually a few different tasks to be working on at any given time, though they intersect and progress neatly enough so that things are rarely overwhelming. Most are of fairly gentle difficulty (especially if you take a few notes as you go), and it’s fun to poke and prod your way through some of the more involved ones (Spoiler - click to show)(I’m thinking especially of the pattern-recognition puzzles to get the horse’s blanket, where even once you figure out what’s entailed, there’s still a bit of pleasant business required to accomplish it – the cat-based navigation puzzle is like this too).

I did have to have recourse to the (well-done) hint menu to resolve one guess-the-verb issue (Spoiler - click to show)(breaking the coconut open using the sharp boulder: I tried CUT COCONUT WITH BOULDER, OPEN COCONUT WITH BOULDER, THROW COCONUT AT BOULDER, PUT COCONUT ON BOULDER… only CRACK COCONUT WITH BOULDER worked). But other than that, the parser is forgiving, the world is detailed and well-implemented, the menu-driven conversations are easy to navigate; Stuff of Legend goes down smooth, even as it manages to lightly tickle your gray matter on its way to a heart-warming resolution.

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Stuff of Legend on IFDB

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This is version 9 of this page, edited by David Welbourn on 24 June 2021 at 4:06pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page