The Van der Nagel Papyrus

Be sure to play the Vorple version on the author's website, which includes fun font stuff and color changes.

This game was developed under time crunch as part of the IronCHIF competition. The prompt was "a scroll that alters the world around it." This game has that! And a ton of puzzles to solve. Puzzles interwoven on top of other puzzles.

My only complaint is the mechanic at the end game.

I live in a city where a lot of the public buildings are in the Brutalist style. If you hang out with architecture nerds at all, sooner or later they'll start in on an impassioned defense of the style, which goes something like this: Making a building out of poured concrete is actually an incredibly difficult thing to pull off, so every single one of those train stations and city offices is a marvel of engineering that one or more clever people put a huge amount of effort into. And I appreciate that! I really do! But at the end of the day, my feelings on Brutalist architecture can't help but be shaped by the fact that I don't really enjoy being in those buildings.

I thought about that a lot while playing The Van der Nagel Papyrus. The things it does with Inform are very impressive, all the more so for having been done on a very short time limit. And unlike with architecture, I do in this case know enough to understand how hard this stuff is to do and admire the technical chops it must take. But as impressed as I am, the feelings I'm coming away with can't help but be shaped by the fact that I spent a lot more time feeling like I was slogging along than actually having fun.

The Van der Nagel Papyrus is set up as a classic "treasure hunt in an eccentric person's mansion" puzzlefest; the Van der Nagel mansion is about to be demolished and it's up to you to try to rescue its treasures, most notably the titular papyrus, before this happens. The details of who you are and why you're doing this are unspecified and basically immaterial. You're here for the puzzles; that's the point.

This is not to say that the writing isn't good; it's fairly spare but has well-chosen, vivid details. There's a general atmosphere of eeriness and melancholy that I think makes the moments of humor hit harder when they appear, similar to Veeder games I've enjoyed like Fly Fishing (and in contrast to the more consistent zaniness of the Little Match Girl games, which I personally don't have a lot of stamina for). But it's a garnish, and the puzzles are the actual meal. If you're enjoying them, you'll probably have a great time! If you're not, it's not really a "play with the walkthrough open to see where this goes" kind of game. (There is no walkthrough currently, but I assume there will be soon.)

Anyway, picking up the papyrus turns out to be only the beginning, as it transforms the world around it in strange ways. I did enjoy this initial phase of exploration (which takes about an hour); the puzzles were reasonably sized and satisfying to solve and the rewards of new discoveries come pretty steadily. But once that initial phase is over, the effort to reward ratio changes considerably as the game comes to revolve around a fiddly, time-consuming puzzle mechanic that I did not enjoy engaging with.

In fairness to the game, once that initial phase is over, it does tell you that you can quit, and it goes on to restate this several times. But doing so gets you nothing that really feels like a finale, either narratively or mechanically, so the "really, you can stop if you want, you're not expected to continue, it's fine!" assurances feel a little hollow.

I will now discuss in more detail the puzzle mechanic that makes up the bulk of the game by play time and why I didn't enjoy it; this is technically a spoiler, so I will hide it for the sake of people who don't want to diminish the "wow!" moment of the initial discovery, but it may be worth looking at regardless if you, like me, enjoy some kinds of puzzles and don't get on at all with others.

If you’d rather not be spoiled, I’ll just say this: The game’s considerable length is not because it has a ton of content (understandable given the constraints under which it was made), and only a little bit because the puzzles are fiendishly difficult and take a long time to figure out. It’s mostly because, once you get past that initial segment, the puzzles are of a type where actually executing the solution is quite time-consuming (and easy to mess up, and more time-consuming if you do). And that, for me, was not a very satisfying game structure—I prefer the ratio of figuring-things-out to grinding-away-at-a-solution to be a little more weighted towards the former. Obviously I’m in the minority here; a lot of people did love it. And again, from a technical perspective it’s a very impressive achievement. But I hope my perspective might be helpful to people in deciding whether this is the kind of thing they would enjoy or not.