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Not a single spell! After two full years of study! Every Enchanter—every mortal with the power to change very nature of the universe with their words—has a spell book! Filled with words of power collected over years, decades, generations...and yours is blank after two entire years of study. It is shameful!
And now something is wrong. You have seen the Enchanters and Sorcerers discussing it in hushed tones. Magic is failing. And there are rumors that GUE Tech will be closed. That would end your dreams of magic forever.
There is only one solution, although it is looking less feasible by the minute. Take your spell book, break into the library, and steal some magic from the Guild of Enchanters.
This is a puzzle-heavy game in the Zork/Enchanter universe, meant as an "unofficial sequel" clearing up some of the mysteries of Spellbreaker.
v.5: 05-Oct-2024 19:16 -
Draconis
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v.4: 23-Aug-2020 00:08 - Zape Changed cross-references | |
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v.1: 29-Jul-2015 23:15 - Draconis
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
IntroComp 2014: Scroll Thief
Scroll Thief is a puzzle game set in the Enchanter universe. This was fun! Which came as a surprise to me, since “Zork/Enchanter homage” is up there with “games about the zombie apocalypse” and “office-setting games where the main puzzle is getting some coffee” as categories that I regard with extreme prejudice. But Scroll Thief is better than the average entry for this kind of thing, relying less on nostalgia or goofy parody and more on actually designing cool puzzles of the kind that made me like Enchanter in the first place.
I imagine there are people who won’t care for the old-school style, or for the various ways in which (as far as I can tell, anyway) you can make the game unwinnable. But I enjoyed the style of puzzle design: scrolls! cute joke messages for using the spells on the wrong things! scrying orbs that let you see into other locations! things where you get an NPC to do stuff that you can’t do yourself! bits where you have to understand the map as a three dimensional space in order to understand where something is likely to be coming out! Meta-spells that modify the effects of other spells!
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These Heterogenous Tasks
IntroComp 2014: Scroll Thief
So: it is a notable thing that even though my neuroreceptors never imprinted on the particular brand of catnip that this is peddling, I kind of want to play Scroll Thief. There’s a small and precious set of games – Savoir Faire, Suveh Nux – which operate on an Enchantery kind of logic, a logically rigorous set of magical powers which interact with the world and one another in fair, clever, unexpected ways. That’s the core experience that Scroll Thief is really going after, and for that I can forgive its attachment to Zorkian tropes. It also keeps the wackiness to a tolerably restrained level; there are rather a lot of extra-diegetic shout-outs, but that’s about the extent of it.
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Transcendent Destinies
IntroComp 2014: 'Tales of the Scroll Thief' by Daniel M. Stelzer
Deliberately old school, The Scroll Thief incorporates some of the rarer techniques from the old commercial era of IF. Its in-jokes and meta references provide the same self-parody for the current IF community that the original Zork provided for the hacker culture at MIT. Some of the puzzle concepts are quite interesting and creative, but the spare and buggy implementation prevents the puzzles from being explored thoroughly. The game can be interpreted as Infocom fan fiction, and also as a wry but largely unironic homage to traditional text adventures.
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Winter of our Discontent
IntroComp 2014 - "The Scroll Thief" by Daniel M. Stelzer
Ah, a Zorkian game! Thank Christ! I love the Zork world and all of its eccentricities, homages, and anachronisms. I even made one myself, but that was just a simple dungeon-crawl. "The Scroll Thief" by Daniel M. Stelzer is, by far, much more than that. Heralded by the author as a non-canonical sequel to the Enchanter Trilogy, in my opinion, Stelzer captures the heart of those stories making "The Scroll Thief" an enjoyable romp in a familiar fantasy world.
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