The Dragon of Silverton Mine

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

It’s always a bit of a risk to draw a throughline in Comp Zeitgeist. A risk, and an inevitability, given our evolution-granted pattern recognition brains. It feels to me like I’ve seen a lot of Twinesformers (link-select UI married to parser style gameplay) this Comp. And a lot of them seem to truck in IF fantasy tropes. Neither of those are automatic hits for me, but hey, I’m game.

DoSM didn’t really cut any new ground in either dimension for me. Its UI was serviceable, definitely aided by its tight scope - it was uncommon to have more than a few objects to juggle at any moment, and navigation was as clear as these things get. That simplicity of design should not be overlooked in its facilitating of player experience. The setup: a magic-user pressed into service to rescue mine workers and deal with a creature infestation, was similarly economical and serviceable. It had all the makings of a Mechanical exercise - not too challenging, not too fiddly, not too engrossing but certainly competent enough.

Where it sparked, for me, was in the writing. The work did not take itself too seriously, but neither did it undermine itself. It marveled at unlikely turns of events with just the right sly tone, letting the player know yes it was in on the joke but no, the joke was not on the player. Every time I could feel myself pulling a little bit away, at a mechanical bit of object manipulation or goal-oriented NPC interaction, some wry bit of writing twisted things just enough to keep things peppy. I think the moment that drove this home for me was a wonderful twist on the “What goes on four legs in the morning…?” riddle that I laughed right out loud at. Ok, the work was not aiming to revolutionize the genre or medium. I don’t think I ever breached into outright Engagement in the proceedings. But it was willing to playfully and warmly josh around a bit, and that was enough to maintain the Sparks to the end.

Not everything need be revolutionary transformations of form. That would be exhausting! Sometimes, a short encounter with an amiable friend is just what the doctor ordered.

Played: 10/3/24
Playtime: 30m, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

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

There is a justly-famous bit in the 1950’s movie Harvey that changed my life when I came across it as an undergrad: Jimmy Stewart (playing a grown man whose best friend is a giant invisible bunny; I look forward to the inevitable remake giving us a CGI look at mega-Flopsy) relates a pearl of wisdom from his mother, namely “in this world, you can be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” And then reflecting on his own experience, he continues: “for years I was smart – I recommend pleasant.” In two lines, it crystallized some feelings I’d been having for months, the dawning realization that responding to an awkward teenagerhood by making sure I was always the cleverest guy in the room, with a sarcastic quip for every occasion, was just self-defense that I didn’t need, and didn’t want, anymore.

Well, it’s a lesson that must be continually be relearned, because reader, I felt oh so smart as I started the Dragon of Silverton Mine, after the introduction told of how this parserlike choice-game’s protagonist, a neophyte mage with only a telekinesis spell to their name, was sent into a collapsed mine to rescue survivors and perhaps track down the cause of the quote-unquote mysterious fires that caused the cave-in. “Spoiler alert for the title,” I jotted down in my notes, chortling the while. But oh, I should have been pleasant, because I was wrong wrong wrong.

Admittedly the setup is a little generic – we’re in whitebread fantasyland, and at first the only distinctive feature is that the comedy-dwarves are German, not Scottish. And if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to troubleshoot mine-based shenanigans, well, I’d need one of those fancy coin-machines to count them all. So yes, Silverton Mine certainly plays the hits; the first puzzle involves wrangling some rope, and your explorations will bring you to flooded tunnels and a ghost-haunted tomb before it’s all over. But it also isn’t afraid to subvert expectations, and the climactic reveal of what was actually amiss, and how I’d need to solve it, brought a big smile to my face. That’s not the only moment where a situation I’d encountered a million times before took an entertaining swerve, either: at one point, a character starts to ask you the oldest chestnut of a riddle, and before they get five words in you get your dialogue options:

Man!
It’s a man!
The answer is man.
Woman works too.

(I, like everyone else I’m sure, selected the last one).

The puzzles are similarly comfortably familiar while boasting enough novelty to stay engaging – and the well-designed interface makes even potentially-fiddly solutions intuitive. In addition to compass-based navigation and clickable links allowing you to investigate and take the objects that you find in the environment, there’s an inventory system that allows you to use the stuff you’re carrying with other inventory items or objects in the current room, with the possibilities fanning out as horizontal tabs atop the item list. It makes trying out your ideas quick and easy, but since the second-object options often include items beyond the relatively small set of interactive links in the main description, it subtly discourages lawnmowering, too. There’s an early multi-step puzzle to find a magic crystal that’s one of my favorites in the Comp so far: I had an “aha” moment at pretty much every stage, and the speed of clicking almost precisely matched my speed of thought.

I should admit that those “aha” moments came in such density because the game is never especially challenging – the only time I felt a bit lost was when I inadvertently clicked the “refresh” button in a dialogue scene, rather than the ellipses that actually moved things forward, and wound up skipping a bunch of exposition. Fortunately, a quick reload fixed that and I was soon back on track. So yes, the Dragon of Silverton Mine will not provide you with brainteasers for the ages, nor will its story or characters stick with you for weeks. But it is both oh so smart and oh so pleasant, and that’s certainly worth appreciating.

This is a Twine game with inventory and world model that has a pretty compact map set in a mine. The idea is that you are a mage who teleports into a collapsed mine with the goal of evacuating everyone inside.

It's a classic low-level dungeon crawl, with spells, treasure, obstacles, commerce, and even the eponymous 'dragon'. All of these ingredients are added in small amounts; most of the game only uses one spell, for instance.

The game doesn't last too long. Much of the plot is about 'just in time' happenings; no matter what thing you need, you just happen to counter exactly that thing.

The game has charming and funny moments, and the text is descriptive. I think I would have liked to have an extra space between paragraphs to more easily distinguish them.

The inventory system was simple to use. I made some mistakes early on, but once I understood how it worked it was great.

It's odd; when I started this review I had in my mind that the game was lacking in some significant way, but I can't really point out anything. It has custom CSS, it had good pacing and interface, it had dangerous and safe moments, it has some Chekhov's guns that go off in satisfying ways. So I'd say it's a pretty good game!