The Den

A really fun puzzle game, one of my favourites from the 2024 IFComp. This is an escape game, of two teenagers escaping the underground bunker they've been raised in.

It's a parser-choice hybrid — you navigate and advance the story through links, but there are points requiring text input (passwords and such). There's areas to explore and revisit at any time, plus inventory. I really like this setup. The navigation felt smooth, the UI clear and understandable. Love the little quality of life touches as well — the ticking off rooms when you've finished with it, the symbols showing locked doors, the station lists on every computer. I didn't even need to take notes!

The puzzles are really fun to figure out, and felt naturally intergrated into the world/narrative. The two protagonists Aiden and Vee are separated early on, a lot of the progression consists of them opening passages for each other, finding hints and passwords for the other to want to use etc. At any point you have multiple avenues of investigation and areas to explore, which combined with the quality of life stuff made the game feel quite smooth. Aiden and Vee can contact each other and their exchanges act as a diagetic hint system, which I appreciated.

This gave me "Silo" vibes, as the mystery of their existence in a post apocalypse underground bunker is slowly revealed as you solve puzzles and investigate your mundane surroundings more closely. Hints and clues keep the story moving.

Swapping control between the two characters in this adventure leads to an interesting paced and double perspective experience. Learning to use both your assets to solve problems and investigate different areas makes this game exciting and fresh.

I enjoyed the easy progression, lack of dead end and stumping problems. Nothing was contrived or unfathomable and that keep the story moving and me engaged.

Highly recommended for casual or beginners, this is a great introduction to adventuring.

Hats off to the writer for his imagination, polish and very cool touches throughout.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

'Awake in sci-fi base, then escape while learning lore' is a tried and true staple of IF, carrying momentum even into the console gaming era. Here it is spun as a two-piece conceit, where two protagonists must work in concert to solve puzzles and help each other, first to suss out the truth of where they live, then to decide what to do with that knowledge.

This is as assured an implementation of this old saw as I’ve seen in a while, and it has everything to do with the design of its alternating, interlocking protagonist puzzles. Some areas being only available to one, some only to the other, controls in those areas having effects in the opposite area - it is a natural progression that feels a bit like a peloton as you alternate leads to make tandem progress. There are subtle gameplay flourishes (like graphically highlighting areas that are finished and lock icons on ones that are still gated) that help wrangle and keep things on track. The central mechanism of hacking computers is an amusing puzzle, and savvy enough to exit gracefully before it becomes a chore. The 'search/secure' and 'use item/explore more area' is all paced and varied very well, never getting into tiresome routine and continually presenting just one more twist on the formula. As a raw puzzle fest, this was well designed and completely Engaging.

The story this is in service of flirted with – no, it flirted, traded digits, then blossomed into a regular hookup with – too-familiar beats. The lore, the antagonist, the overarching challenge, you’ve seen all these things before, and the main narrative here is not going to astonish you. The work still has some tricks up its sleeve though. Every time you start to feel jaded by the plot, there are flourishes that tweak just enough to elicit a smile or nod of appreciation. A mid-point scene where one character encounters the antagonist had a true frisson of ‘oh crap, did I just lose this game?’ followed by, ‘ooh, clever moment, narrative.’ The allusionary linkages are so in-your-face as to circle around from ‘oh c’mon, this?’ all the way around to ‘lol, ok, you’ve won me over with your confidence.’ It’s been a while since I’ve seen a work sell its unsubtlety this thoroughly on little more than the strength of its commitment to the bit. I mean, the (Spoiler - click to show)protagonists’ names, the final (Spoiler - click to show)vessel for the cure… and then the PLAYFULNESS WITH THE TITLE GRAPHICS??? Fair enough work, you earned it. I would say the narrative didn’t wow me, but it did ultimately sell itself. (Caveat. There was one narrative choice that felt a shade off. Given the work’s final, heavy-handed-but-loveable-for-it conceit, it is odd that for most of the work, the protagonists were characterized as (Spoiler - click to show)siblings. I get the misdirect value it serves to the narrative, but that’s gonna make the epilogue WEIRD.)

Here is the deeply unfair portion of the program. This author’s previous works really raised the bar on graphical integration. Their skill in this arena is top tier, and among the things I most look forward to in their work. The Den flouted this established strength by incorporating almost no graphics into the proceedings. Look, this author doesn’t OWE that to any of us, but I couldn’t help but imagine a version of the game graced with epic graphics WHILE I WAS PLAYING. My brain is a dick, but there it is. Really, really Engaging puzzle play, a narrative that should have been Mechanical but Sparked nevertheless, and the whole time, thinking of graphics that could have been.

Played: 10/7/24
Playtime: 1.75hr, 93/97 survival chance, also fail end
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless, penalty point for shortchanging that patented BJaxn Graphix!
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

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

Let us imagine that puzzley choice games can be separated into two categories – yes, yes, this is an oversimplification even on its own terms, and requires arbitrarily saying that stat-based things like the Choice of Games offerings or Fallen London-style quality-based narratives present “challenges” rather than “puzzles”, but come on, let’s just go with it, two categories: you have your parserlike games that, well, mimic parser games by adopting granular, often compass-based navigation through a modeled world, usually with a persistent inventory and a point-and-click style “choose the verb, then choose the noun” interface; and then you have your escape-room-y games that rely on things like solving codes to reveal combinations that unlock doors or abstract minigames that ape classic puzzles.

There’s a lot that’s well done about the Den, but one of the things that’s most interesting to me is the way it deftly hybridizes these two approaches and winds up with a best-of-both-worlds situation. As you guide a pair of teenagers through their exploration of the high-tech bunker where a mysterious figure is protecting or perhaps imprisoning them, you’ll hoover up every portable item you can find and get very familiar with deactivating fans to enable you to crawl through ventilation ducts, but you’ll also largely do so via a fast travel system putting the whole expansive map at your fingertips, and for every USE X ON Y puzzle, you’ll find yourself doing a round of a streamlined Wordle variant. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything especially innovative, but this cannily designed interface makes what could have felt like a dauntingly large, tricky game a breeze to play.

Not that this is a lighthearted story by any means. The situation both inside and outside the bunker appears to be bad, with a series of earthquakes threatening the Den’s systems while the hints of backstory you come across via computer hacking suggesting that life on the surface isn’t a picnic any longer either. Fortunately, the two leads aren’t the type to sink into a funk; early on, you gain the ability to switch at will between Aiden, a practical whiz who occasionally breaks the rules from being a bit irresponsible, but might not be ready for larger rebellion against the system that’s raised him, and Vee, his driven yet compassionate counterpart. They’re both broadly drawn, but these are YA archetypes for a reason – the functional yet effective writing does a good job of getting across their distinct, appealingly-plucky personalities:

"He eventually smashed into the base of the shaft, leaving a large dent in the metal floor. Incredibly, apart from a few scrapes and bruises, he survived unscathed. He took great gulps of air and tried to calm the rush of adrenaline. He started to giggle, which seemed to him the strangest of reactions. He felt giddy. This was stupid, and terrifying, but hadn’t he wanted an adventure?"

I also enjoyed the way that the story tips its hand, using an early unexpected POV shift to foreshadow that the truth behind the Den is more nuanced than just the standard authoritarian dystopia. The backstory you uncover winds up being surprisingly grounded, and even involves some low-key social comment.

For all that the narrative elements are solid, this is first and foremost a puzzle game, and the set of challenges on offer here are quite good. The aforementioned Wordle riff is just as fun as its inspiration, and right as I was starting to get a little impatient with playing it over and over, the game offered a shortcut enabling me to skip past it when it came up in subsequent challenges. The inventory puzzles are all logical without feeling trivial – the extended set of actions you need to take to recover your lost screwdriver are especially satisfying. The parceling out of gameplay between the two leads is also well paced; you can ping-pong back and forth to run down a particular puzzle chain, or decide instead to bear down with a single character and work through a substantial chunk of progress before having to swap back. And the game escalates its challenges alongside its narrative: the climactic sequence creates a real feeling of mastery, as it prompts you to use what you’ve learned to allow Aiden and Vee to collaborate (albeit in occasionally implausible ways that had me wondering whether they had an ESP connection) and escape the Den at last – or indeed, not, as rather than a linear sequence of puzzles there are actually story-based decisions to make along the way, too.

This commitment to engaging the player and making sure they’re having a good time is all over this thoughtfully-designed game; the only real misstep I can point to is the decision to implement conversations between the two leads as a diegetic hint system, which meant I felt like I had to forego fun character interaction to avoid spoiling the enjoyable puzzles. The Den is scrupulous about making sure most players will find something to like, and smoothing away the edges that might create undue friction – it’s also quite generous, culminating in a wealth of fun post-game extras that put a lovely cap on proceedings. The ending also includes a request not to spoil the plot, which is why I’ve stuck to describing the situation in general terms; suffice to say the story is of a piece with the rest of the Den, executing standard tropes at a very high level while throwing in a few bonus grace notes. This is a real gem, and a game I wouldn’t be surprised to see launch imitations, perhaps eventually even a mini-genre, of its own.