Moondrop Isle

Moondrop Isle is nine games stitched into one. Ryan Veeder, hosting The Third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition in his official capacity as Ryan Veeder, has invited eight collaborators to contribute to a huge puzzle game set in an abandoned holiday resort, each author writing their own area. Each area is its own game file; some technical wrangling by Nils Fagerburg tracks information such as your inventory and what doors you've unlocked so that your game state carries over from one area-game to the next. This allows you to walk from an Inform project to a TADS project to a Twine file. It's genuinely very exciting.

The isle itself is gigantic. I make it about 330 distinct rooms, but can't confirm because it's so big my Trizbort map refuses to bring up the map statistics. Exploration is unfocused at first - room descriptions draw your attention to the isle's central Hotel within the first few moves, but it can take a long time before you discover a way to get there, never mind getting inside. But the process of exploration and mapping itself is fun, because each author brings their own voice, style and experiments to their own areas. Carl Muckenhoupt's Shore is sprawling but peaceful, easing you into the game but hiding more than a few secrets; Joey Jones' Lunarcade and Jason Love's Moonlight Meadow recreation centre are complicated puzzle boxes with plenty of verticality; Caleb Wilson's Tunnels are twisty and atmospheric and eerie. Even the gameplay can change from author to author; most areas are parser-based but Fagerburg's Endymion Gardens limits the parser and Mark Marino's Fortune Teller area is something completely different (and one of the great technical achievements of Moondrop Isle in its own right).

It risks feeling chaotic, but the wider geography of the isle feels right. The areas are unified by the inventory shared between them all - every major puzzle-solving item will have uses all over the isle. There are also a few ongoing plot threads scattered across areas, usually not vital but fun to spot, which help Moondrop Isle feel more like a place where people played and worked.

The puzzle quality is impressively high between all the authors. Standout puzzles include the devious kiosks that appear in Muckenhoupt's Shore in the mid-game ((Spoiler - click to show)which struck fear in my heart when I realised those puzzles from The Fool's Errand were back to haunt me), Sarah Willson's Obra-Dinn-in-miniature storage locker logic puzzle in the Hotel, the scavenger hunts spread across Zach Hodgens' Gibbous Grove mall (which is a delight to explore, by the way), and the absurd overload of information in the centrepiece puzzle of Veeder's own contribution. The difficulty is generally genial with a few toughies, but those toughies often have easier alternative solutions - Love has been especially kind about this with the intricate puzzles in Moonlight Meadow, which are worth a go but which can be mercifully simplified. That said, it can trip you up if you spend ages trying to figure out a puzzle which turns out to let you into an area which you already accessed via a back door.

Implementation can be a little spotty in the most complex areas, but the technical structure of the game means that bugfixes can be pushed without breaking saves (theoretically), so those aren't too worrying. However, I would have liked more consistency in how verbs are handled between the different games. This is most obvious with the meta-verbs - commands like "help" or "exits" give hints in some areas and do nothing at all in others, which can be a nasty surprise if you're using these to get your bearings in a new area. This is a bigger problem with important objects where certain verb constructions are necessary in some areas but unimplemented in others, which could be very unfair to players who try the correct phrasing in the wrong area and think it won't work. (I'm especially thinking of a late-game object, the decoder scope - the full command LOOK AT SOMETHING THROUGH SCOPE is required sometimes, but only sometimes, so that if you get used to the more common LOOK THROUGH SCOPE, you might be tricked into thinking it doesn't have a use in certain places.)

Did I mention the guinea pigs? There's like 20 guinea pigs roaming the island, and they can walk between game files which is unbelievable in itself, and you can name them and the different games remember what you named them. Should I have led with that? That might be the #1 reason to play Moondrop Isle.

This is a big sprawling puzzly game built with a web interface that stitches together nine separately-written games to share inventory between them. It's an interesting idea, but as with many first takes on a new idea, it's more notable for the technical gimmick than being a stellar-quality game.

The biggest issue for me is the pacing: you know how in a metroidvania there's that early/mid-game rush of finding new abilities that unlock new areas and secrets ...and then they always peter out with that tedious end-game hunting around for those last lousy points and do you even care enough to scour the map for every last thing that you missed, and did you take good enough notes the first time around?

This game starts with that. There is a big multi-part map, there are a lot of items, and it feels like the progression gating is relatively stingy so you have to find the right one (or right few ones) first. So it took several hours of wandering around mapping before I felt like I was getting anywhere, and even then... I don't know if I care. A lot of the ideas are creative ((Spoiler - click to show)there's a metal detector; a pair of waders; I haven't found it yet, but it's strongly suggested that there's a viewing device for autostereogram posters) but a lot of the time it feels like they were invented as an excuse to link the various parts of the game or limit progression rather than because they were necessary for any story purposes or were a cool mechanic in themselves?

I don't know. The overall design feels very slapdash and "(slaps roof) look how many wacky ideas we can fit in this bad boy" rather than a thoughtful design process of "how will this feel to the player? Does adding this really improve the feel?"

And there's not a lot of story. Again, it's wacky bits and pieces and the narrative is super-spotty here. I'm four or five hours in and I still have no idea who I am or why I'm here or what I'm trying to do, other than wander around looking at silly stuff and solving puzzles because they're here. What's so important that I was reckless enough to take a kayak across the ocean at night to explore this island? Why am I such a feckless idiot that I didn't bring any supplies or even a light source? (that's one that really REALLY feels like "nobody thought about this AT ALL; they just needed a way to gate off some areas until you found an item. And it's super inconsistent and nonsensical; sometimes you can read things by the light of (Spoiler - click to show)the jellyfish in an inlet and sometimes you can apparently see fine in some (Spoiler - click to show)underground tunnels with no explanation. I don't get it. Don't ask questions, just play along).

So if you're looking for a sprawling world with lots of puzzles connecting the bits, if you like making maps and taking notes so you can find that one weird spot again later, if you like realizing that "oh, now I can make progress over here," this is probably right up your alley.

If you need a reason for solving puzzles other than "they exist: of course you want to solve them" or a story motivating the thing (that's not just shallow facile "what wacky random things can we shove in here?") or something where you always have a puzzle to make progress on instead of mostly wandering the map looking for one of the few places where you can make progress... don't waste your time. I've poked around 7 of 9 of the regions and I wouldn't say this is any of those authors' best work.