Familiar Problems

I playtested this game and have replayed the published version. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but here are my thoughts otherwise!

First, the game is just plain fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments, and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. (Spoiler - click to show)The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. (Spoiler - click to show)Soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.

The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.

Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!

I had a few different revelations while playing this game. First thoughts: interesting mix of hyperlinks and parser. Second: is this vorple? No, Dialog. Third: a joke about Peano arithmetic? This is someone who's really familiar with parser games and math, I have to know this person. But I didn't recognize the itch name until I went to their page and saw it was Draconis!

This game is very polished. I had no idea it was meant for Petite Morte, as it would fit in just fine in IFComp. I'd say I had a 10/10 experience in the beginning, 7/10 in the middle, and 8/10 in the end.

It's a limited-verb game where you, a kind of homonculus or familiar, gain new verbs by absorbing other homunculi or familiars. These can give powers ranging from eyesight to motion to strange alchemical powers.

The game is educational as well as fun, with references to chemistry, tuning, literature, math, etc.

I was proud of not needing hints until I got stuck on a certain puzzle. I eventually realized I wasn't closely reading the results of all my actions, but only after hints. "Nudge" was useful, but for a large chunk of the game my nudge was 'gong', so I kept assuming I had to do something *to* it. That lost period was my 7/10 section.

Two things that could have been clued a bit more were what can be 'cached' and the rules surrounding the security familiar in all its uses.

Overall, very good, exactly the kind of stuff I hope for when I play interactive fiction.