KING OF XANADU

I felt kind of detached from this game, but it’s decent.

It’s a bit of a Rorscach test. Throughout the game, you’re given a range of choices which seem to range from most active to least active.

The situation is clearly pretty bad early on. But acting passively and risking neglect is conceivably as good a response as a heavy-handed solution that makes things worse, so all of the options are viable at face value.

This made reading other people’s reviews pretty interesting. The apparent differences in reviewers’ preferred choices intrigued me and convinced me to play.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the choices are that interesting on their own right. First of all, the ruler in the game is portrayed as excessive, but was hard to feel that anything he did was particularly shocking. I thought the weird stuff might be par for the course, since the game seems to have a historical setting (or possibly a fantasy-historical setting).

Secondly, I got the feeling that the author was trying to draw a parallel to the modern day in some way that isn’t clear. I suppose the central famine could be highlighting concerns about an ecological disaster or a global food crisis. However, it could be a stand in for any kind of fatalism (or, derogatorily, “doomerism”). But in the end, the specific events in the game don’t seem to add up to any sort of parable.

Since the game presents extremely broad life philosophies at the end, maybe I am totally off base in trying to find social commentary. My apologies to the author in that case.

A Good Foundation

Even though I was presented with choices that didn’t intrigue me. the game did gently nudge my pessimistic tendencies, and the basic scenario was good enough to hold my attention for the 15-20 minute playtime.

I think it might difficult to make a thoroughly compelling story around this structure because the audience is waiting for a collapse that acts as a payoff, which kind of devalues the incidental events that lead up to the ending.

A counterpoint might be The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which relies heavily on side characters and plots to tell its story of impending doom and is highly regarded. However, I haven’t played it for decades and never played it in full, so I don’t know how closely you can really compare it.

A Squiffy Game in the Wild

Finally, this is the first time I’ve come across a game made in Squiffy, or at least, the first time that I’ve consciously noticed one, which is surprising since the engine is apparently about ten years old.

I only see a few games tagged or keyworded with ‘Squiffy’ on IFDB. Can anyone tell me how common this engine is?