Quest for the Serpent's Eye

Everyone knows a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but for all that, there is something in a name – and is there an author’s name more likely to strike terror in a player’s heart than “lazygamedesigner82”? Whether they’re intentionally hearkening back to the text adventures of 1982, or they were just born back then, it’s definitely a warning that the game they’ve produced is going to lack modern conveniences. Similarly, especially for a parser game, a good author has to be the very opposite of lazy, making sure that there’s sufficient depth of implementation, and enough proactive clueing, to make a game anything other than an exercise in frustration. Combined with the fact that Quest for the Serpent’s Eye is a Quest 5 game written as late as 2020, that the blurb winks at all the old-school tropes that to my taste were stale before Infocom shut down, and that the instructions tell you you might need both LOOK IN and LOOK UNDER, I went into this one bracing myself against the pain that was inevitably going to make this experience a torture.

Reader, I was as wrong as I’ve ever been. Low-plot-1980s-throwback-puzzle-fest is by no means my IF subgenre of choice – to put it mildly – so I am as shocked as anyone to relate that I had a really fun time with this.

In one sense, it’s exactly what it looks like. You’re off on a lightly-motivated treasure hunt for the eponymous gem – your old professor went missing trying to find it, so of course you decide to track down both her and it – in a jungle / cave / temple setting that couldn’t be more cliched if it featured in an Indiana Jones movie. The puzzles are a mix of straightforward medium-dry-goods stuff – cutting vines with a machete, that sort of thing – and escape-the-deathtrap gameplay. There’s even a maze. And as advertised, there are monochrome graphics with almost no straight lines, lending everything a wibbly-wobbly vibe.

But contrary to that “lazy” sobriquet, tremendous care has been taken with every aspect of the thing. The puzzles are actually carefully considered, with a relatively small map and relatively small number of objects helping attune the player to the clues that are there to help you progress. Death can come frequently, but it instantly warps you back to where you were so you can try again. The game makes the obvious jokes and references – the shopkeeper is named Stanley – but also goes a step beyond to make the non-obvious ones, too – the ship you arrive on is called the S.S. Fawcett. There’s an infectious enthusiasm to the prose that feels distinctive while staying perfectly in-genre, plus some one-liners that made me laugh out loud (the list of example commands in the HELP text includes “SHOW DRIVERS LICENSE TO HORSE”). The traditional ASK ABOUT conversational system is implemented with an impressive depth of topics. The graphics started to grow on me after a while, and somehow, there’s even a cool twist in the ultra-generic plot that’s well-telegraphed but still took me by surprise.

Quest for the Serpent’s Eye of course isn’t a perfect game – there are a couple of later puzzles that I think are a bit underclued, especially a speak-friend-and-enter riff that feels like it’s taking unfair advantage of a player’s likely assumptions, and it suffers from some of the weaknesses of the Quest 5 platform (notably, you can’t save if you play online, and I wound up losing my progress after alt-tabbing for a bit. Definitely download this one and play it in the interpreter!) But the strong design, robust implementation, assiduous polish, and genial good humor – not to mention the fact that the author puts themself very clearly on the player’s side, rather than an adversarial position – makes this one of the very few games that communicates to a modern player why this style of adventure built a following back in the day, and still has something to offer to a contemporary audience. Typically when I review games in this genre, I wrap up by saying some variation of “if you like this kind of thing, you’ll probably like this.” But for a change I can just say hey, I think you’ll probably like this.

Played: 7/19/24
Playtime: 2hrs, 2 false starts, good ending

I don’t know what it is with these alternate platforms for me. Just getting the game to launch was a mini-game of its own. Initially I tried to create an account on the hosting site, only to be told “there is an error, please try again.” Trying again, I was told my username/pwd was already in use, but no email (with confirmation link) was ever sent, meaning I was locked out. Then I just decided to play it without account, meaning I would not be able to save. Without a net baybee!

Unfortunately, the web hosting was not great. Periodically, I would encounter fits of extreme lag between command entry and response. Which looked like unaccepted commands, so I would keep retrying until eventually the first command response came back. Until eventually that didn’t work either and after 5 minutes of wait I concluded it was never coming back. That safety (save-ty?) net would have really come in handy at that point.

So I reloaded the game to try and fly back to stall point, only this time a crucial (and unfair) event failed to happen like last time. Consulting walkthrough, the prerequisites SEEM to have been met, so maybe something about reloading corrupted state? Killed window, started again. This time was able to play through, but with nearly 1.5hrs invested in frustration. Let me put all that aside though (assuming I can), and focus on gameplay.

It is an old school throwback design, deliberately evoking the primitive Apple II graphics and limited vocab gameplay. It did some nice work introducing its command particularities while simultaneously setting the mood with a charming opening sequence of ‘sit down and play.’ The illustrations were amateurish, but in a fun, loving homage kind of way. Early puzzles went fairly smoothly, though there were lots of glitches in vocab, mystery verbs (>LOWER VINES) and weird longhand sequences (>PUT KEY IN KEYHOLE instead of >UNLOCK DOOR (WITH KEY)). I found myself consulting walkthrough almost always to figure out how to key in a solution, not because the solution was unclear. Given the energy spent early to acclimatize players, these occurrences felt like a gap?

That said, fussy verbs, incomplete synonyms and janky syntax were not unheard of in early days, so it didn’t feel out of place, and maybe part of the nostalgic vibe? I did appreciate that instant death and unwinnable states had guardrails put around them which might not have been there in the old days.

Aside from fighting syntax, the puzzles were lowkey fun, probably in the middle/low end of difficulty with one or two moon logic ones, but often amusing and satisfying nonetheless. If I could tease out my frustrations with the platform, would be a recommend for anyone needing a shot of greyscale graphics adventures. Its not cutting any new ground, but it is faithfully and warmly recreating welcome old ground.

I trust others’ experiences with the platform will not be so fraught.