How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title

If, through some strange quirk of the hyperlink-chain that got you here, my words are the first you are reading about this game know this: Quisborne is a mammoth game. It took me over 37 hours, 2 full weeks, start to finish. I laughingly said at start "This may take me longer than Spiderman 2." It didn't, BUT IT COULDA. With a game of such epic scale, my normal review approaches strain and buckle. Would you want to read a five hour summary? A three hour thematic deconstruction and post-mortem? Heck, a forty-five minute riff on prose style and craftsmanship? Of course you don't. You wanna know if it's worth your time, and since I probably shocked and awed you I'll just flat say: It definitely is.

Charged with mentoring a young, sheltered Prince, the player pursues an epic quest to fulfill the youthful monarch-to-be's dreams of making himself worthy of his legacy and love interest. Yeah, it involves solving puzzles. So many puzzles. If at this point you are starting to think, "Oh ok, I have the measure of this game," I promise you do not. Every image you have in your head of a puzzle-driven IF fantasy quest is technically accurate. It's just laughably inadequate - like a grainy, faded, off-center and out-of-focus Polaroid of the ACTUAL Quisborne.

Actual Quisborne is a wide-screen, technicolor, surround-sound experience of deep world building, epic scale, vivid characters, challenging logistical and mechanical puzzles, and sweet charm. And wordplay. So many jokes, puns and poems. It's like the man said, "If you didn't laugh at that one, don't worry, three hundred more are coming right behind it."

From the jump it pulls you into its thrall with its graphical presentation. (do use QTADS as your interpreter. You only hurt yourself by not) The graphical flourishes and music are evocative, disciplined and delightful, and marry with the PDF map to create the perfect fantasy-road-novel vibe.

Quisborne is also probably the most tightly crafted parser you will ever play, certainly the tightest one I've played. For all its scope and depth, there is exacting precision in its player experience. Great thought has been put into Quality of Play features, designed to reduce or eliminate player frictions. A frankly deranged amount of time has been devoted to incidental dialogue, atmosphere, scenes and vignettes that suggest a wild, vibrant world around you. NPCs have arcs, memories and call backs, situational awareness and so, so many stories. A staggering amount of unique responses to player actions give a near conversational feel that defies IF repetition fatigue better than any game I've seen. So many, that I suspect even the most leisurely playthrough may experience less than 50% of the text in the game. Is it flawless? No. At its size, statistically it CAN'T be. I found a few bugs (since fixed), you probably will too. I can say, as a percentage of its runtime, the bug impact is in insignificant digits.

On the topic of gameplay engineering, its multi-tiered hint system is amazing. From subtle, unsolicited "by the ways" from your companion, to a pre-hint NUDGE command, to task lists, memories and a top-tier progressive HINT function, your vast problem space may feel overwhelming, but the game provides whatever level of lifeline you prefer.

There are accommodations to make with the game for sure, even beyond its raw scale. The first is its prose. Springing from a tradition of tiny, memory constrained machines, classic IF leans to the terse side of description. Bringing that expectation here is a mistake. Quisborne will inundate you with words - I once uncharitably described it as Class IV torrents of words. They're pretty great words, but man are there a lot of them. They very much do the work of establishing the lore and atmosphere of the world but you will need to adjust to their pace.

These words also weave a finely detailed tapestry. At one point, I had cause to compare it Where's Waldo. There are SO many fine details, picking out important ones becomes a puzzle of its own. Quisborne demands and rewards your attention to detail. It is easy to lose sight of that amidst the heroic scope of the thing but DO NOT FORGET. It is a cold, uncaring fantasy world, it is not your friend. WATCH IT CLOSELY.

The next accommodation is its breadth of puzzle play. You are going to be served a delightful buffet of varied puzzles: (modest) mazey mapping, logic posers, hide and seek, crafting, bizarre logic jumps, creative misuse of objects, so many more. Inevitably, some will hit your brain's precise chemical cocktail better than others. While there are masterful setpieces everyone will clap with glee at, likely there will be a few that chafe more than delight. HINT your way past those is my advice. There's 300 great ones right behind it. I mean by the time you get to the Witch's House... ahhh, no. I want to but I can't.

So, I haven't talked much about the story all this is in service of yet. Y'know how some stories are thrill-ride, twist-a-minute shockers that gut punch with surprise after surprise? This is not that. This is a road novel in IF form, building character and story through a series of idiosyncratic vignettes around a tight thematic core. It is slower, sweeter, and richer for it. The ending it builds towards is just about perfect, thick with deeply earned emotion. When finally finishing, you will get the same mix of satisfaction and regret as from a great novel.

It's very funny. It's EPIC. It's challenging. It's a lot. It's expertly crafted. It's DEEP. It's rewarding. 37 hours well spent.

Played: 3/12-26/24
Playtime: 37.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging in the moment, Transcendent in realized scope, Mostly Seamless

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I beta tested this game).

I always find it hard to review games I’ve tested, because even when I replay the final, finished version, my first impression is inescapably of a no-longer-extant game still in the process of reaching its ultimate form; I sometimes attempt some mental gymnastics to try to figure out how my sense of a game might differ from that of someone coming to it fresh, but that’s especially challenging here, because Prince Quisborne is a massive game that I haven’t had the opportunity to revisit in any depth, and I first started testing it in February. So my memories are more distant than I’d like, I haven’t refreshed them recently, and I suspect the addition of some new features, like the NUDGE command that points you to areas where you’re able to make progress, or the DESTINATIONS-based fast travel system to minimize the challenge of navigating the large, diagonal-direction-happy map, radically smooth out the gameplay. Nevertheless I feel obliged to write something by way of comment on the most Brobdingnagian game of this, or, perhaps, any Comp, but you might want to take it with even more salt than usual.

Right, with that distressingly on-point intro out of the way, let’s talk about tarof, which is the Persian practice of hospitality. So far as I’ve experienced it (I have an Iranian-American wife and in-laws), the thing that’s distinctive about tarof is its extravagant generosity. The quintessential example is that you’ll be invited over for lunch, and on your way in you’ll maybe mutter some compliment about the nice rug they have in their living room, at which point your host will beam at you and say “oh, it’s a terrible old thing, I hate it, but I’m so glad you like it, let me give it to you!” At which point you might protest a) you weren’t dropping a hint or anything like that; and b) actually you’re no expert on rugs but now that you look at it it sure seems very nice and actually probably quite expensive. But they’ll say it’s kind of you but no need to be polite, actually you’d be doing me a favor if you take it. And as you try to think of what to say, your host will gently shove you out of the way, get down on their hands and knees, and start rolling the thing up for you. The thing is, this is obviously incredibly nice. But it’s also super overbearing – it’s too much, and even leaving that aside, how the hell are you supposed to get that giant rug home?

And so we come again to Prince Quisborne, which combines the vast scope of a mainframe game with the intricate depth of implementation of a short one-room one, and presents its epic story in a prose style that’s prolix to a fault. In some ways this is the dream that animated the early amateur IF scene: a whole world rendered in jewel-like detail, where you could equally well traipse from one side of a kingdom to the other, and pause anywhere along the way to take in a pagelong random event tied to your exact progression through the plot, or stop off at a blacksmith’s shop to futz around with a fully functional forge, or visit a mini area with fiendishly complex logic and word puzzles that could be a whole game in its own right.

I’m not sure I’ve come across anything else that incarnates this vision nearly as well – Cragne Manor is the only plausible contender, and as a game with 84 authors and all the incoherence that implies, it’s not really a close comparison – and the thing is, having experienced it, it’s not obvious that this was such a good idea. Prince Quisborne is a lot; the prologue is manageable, though already shows off the author’s facility with jokey high-fantasy-ish language and love of multiple puzzle solutions, but once past that lagniappe, the full game unfolds and I can only imagine that most players will issue a gulp, much like I did, once they realize exactly what they’re in for: sure, an incredible voyage of discovery where your eponymous protégé will learn to be a grown-up under your tutelage as you unlock ancient secrets, but also puzzles that rely on having searched an unobtrusive bit of scenery halfway around the world, or remembering an incidental detail from a lore dump ten hours ago; or finding the thingabob you suddenly realize you need means remembering whether you first saw it in Chelkwibble or Chedderwicket; and when you hit the big plot-progressing cutscenes to hand, I sure hope you have a drink and snack handy.

As with tarof, it’s easy to look at all of this and just think “it’s too much”, especially in the press of the Comp. But unlike with tarof, which is embedded in complex systems of power, class, and reciprocity that need to be navigated to maintain politeness, there’s really no downside or ulterior motive here: Prince Quisborne is precisely as generous as it appears to be. If a player tries to rush through it in one go, I suspect they’ll resent it, but if instead it’s played over weeks or months, I suspect it’d deservedly be one of the greatest IF experiences you’ve ever had. It’s extraordinarily rich, and the more I played it, the more I appreciated touches like Prince Quisborne’s facility for having a limerick for every situation, or the way his character subtly changes over the course of the journey as experience leads him from callow youth to surprisingly-touching heroism. In fact, I’m not ashamed to admit that the ending sequence made me tear up – while PQ starts out as a comedy character, he achieves real depth by the finish, and the way the game acknowledges his growth is at once a total blindsiding and completely, necessarily obvious. It’s one of the most impressive climaxes to a piece of IF I’ve ever experienced, so if you’re wondering whether pressing through to the end is worth it, I can say that it emphatically is.

PQ also goes out of its way to be friendly to the player, without watering itself down in the slightest: there are all those convenient commands I mentioned at the beginning, as well as an always-on inventory window, exhaustive hints, and a lovely, inviting presentation (for the love of god, play this in QTADS to get the full experience). One doesn’t need to meet PQ halfway, only a quarter of the way at most.

This is still a commitment, let me reiterate! I’d guess this is at least a 20 hour game. But each of those hours will show you something worthwhile, and the accumulation of them accomplishes things very few other games have done. Now that the Comp is over, it’s the perfect time to approach PQ as it deserves to be approached: dedicate some time. Let go of the idea that you need to race through it (or that you should have any shame about consulting hints or the walkthrough!) And get ready to experience something extraordinary.

I beta tested this game, but that doesn't change how I feel about this game!

Now, this game is a massive, puzzly exploration through a highly detailed, fun fantasy world. I love this game. The puzzles are neat, the hints work fully, and so on. Plus, the coming-of-age story and the endless description add to a feeling of a world without stop, much like our world - but countless times more beautiful.

Song: There, There (The Boney King of Nowhere).