A Warm Reception

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.

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.

I find it very hard to review a game like A Warm Reception, because it’s part of a very well-populated subgenre – the anachronism-and-joke-filled fantasy romp by a first-time parser author – that could just as well be designed to frustrate criticism. These games are usually more wacky than funny, inevitably have some infelicities of implementation, and offer up puzzles you’ve generally seen a million times before and a plot that you’ve seen a couple million more than that. But all of that is besides the point; these games are mostly earnest learning experiences, where the author is visibly having a great time making a world and bringing it to life. And that enthusiasm can be infectious when, like the present case, they’re well put-together. So perhaps the thing to do is take as read all the above critiques, so we can just move on to the things that are relatively unique about A Warm Reception.

It must be said that the premise is one of those elements that stands out – you’re a medieval reporter who’s going to the princess’s wedding reception to write a puff piece – but also one that the game jettisons on pretty much the first screen. The castle is of course deserted (relatable, NPCs are tricky!) because a dragon’s rather spoiled the party by attacking, so it’s of course up to you to save the day by driving off the beast (in fairness, if you try to sleep the narrator will demur, saying “you need to finish the case”, so it’s unclear you really know how journalism is supposed to work). So off you go to ransack your way through the mid-sized castle, looking for the equipment that will give you an edge in the final fight with nary a second thought of the “wait, doesn’t the king have a guy for this sort of thing?” variety to slow you down.

That actually leads to a second unique element: rather than having to check every item off the scavenger hunt before you can reach the endgame, you can give it a go any time you like, with your score giving you bonuses on a d20 roll that determines the outcome. It’s the kind of idea that could work in a tabletop RPG, but winds up unsatisfying in an IF context; for one thing, you can just UNDO-scum to get to the winning sequence right out the gate, and for another, your reward for gutting out a close victory is that you miss out on content. More charitably I suppose the idea is that you get to skip puzzles that you aren’t working for you, but actually the puzzles are fun enough that I was motivated to finish them all. Sure, a bunch are straightforward lock-and-key dealies, and there’s a maze with a blink-and-you-missed-it gimmick, but the author manages to deploy typical medium-dry-goods interactions in entertaining ways – the puzzle chain involving the moths is especially good.

So much for the bits that are memorable. The prose and implementation fall into the “workmanlike” category; I won’t harp on the latter, except to note that there are a few places where simply examining an object triggers an action, like allowing you to input the combination to a safe, which led to some moments of confusion (for the author, I noted a couple of additional small snags in the attached transcript). As to the former, well, this is the kind of medieval fantasy world where they eat pizza and reference break-dancing and professional wrestling. For all that I still found the plot more endearing than it needs to be, with patriarchal mores lightly sent up and love conquering all in the end.

Now that I’ve run through a bunch of particulars, by tradition I should now transition back to some general judgment and overall critical evaluation of A Warm Reception. But as I said, that’s devilishly hard – it’s a solidly engaging but slightly rough entry in a deeply inessential subgenre, so what does that make it? I guess we can just call it a promising start for an author who might very well wow us with their second game.