The Dragon of Silverton Mine

This is a well-made Twine/Sugarcube game that tries to get as close to the traditional adventure game format as possible.

I’m going to skip right to the game’s main mechanic: the telekinesis spell.

Often in Twine and choice-based adventure games — and even in graphical adventure games — I feel like I’m just doing object association. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something, because unlike in parser games, I can’t spontaneously try a verb.

Despite those limitations, using the telekinesis spell in The Dragon of Silverton Mine kind of does feel like performing an action. That’s because it has slightly different effects throughout the game: sometimes it just moves a thing where the game needs it to go; sometimes it shifts something to dislodge a buoyant object, and sometimes it doesn’t work and you’re informed that you need to power it up.

(Certain other Twine games also have central mechanics with diverse effects. I got the same feeling from Agnieszka Trzaska’s The Bones of Rosalinda. Bones has a more complex and more impressive central mechanic, but I also enjoyed the simplicity of Dragon.)

These systems still don’t give total freedom of action, but they do give a sensation that can’t just be reduced to handling or using an object.

Otherwise Pretty Traditional

Apart from that, the The Dragon of Silverton Mine is short and sweet.

Not all puzzles involve the telekinesis spell. Many puzzles fall back on object association, and the game gives you a lot of information when you need it. If you try and use two things and you did it wrong, the game pretty much tells you what you need to do.

I only felt misdirected in one puzzle — the one where you need to get oil. You need to find it in the (Spoiler - click to show)shed, but oil is also mentioned in a few places that you’ll probably have visited more recently.

I think I spotted a few minor bugs, too. The hidden burrow is described in the inventory screen before you actually uncover it. And I think the note about the ring reappeared in its original position after the game took both the ring and the note out of play. These are minor things, and I didn’t see any errors that broke the game. It’s very well-made, especially for what seems to be a first game — though maybe the author has made stuff outside of IF.

The humor is good, and the final twist is fun. However, I would note that the game gradually becomes funnier as you progress — I was expecting a much more serious game when I started.

Decent Design

Finally, I wanted to comment on the design. This game modifies the Sugarcube layout a bit.

I’ve come to kind of dislike Sugarcube’s default sidebar because it takes up a lot of space and is very empty by default. I assume that the reason it’s laid out like so that authors can easily add things line-by-line, like in @agat’s 4x4 Galaxy. However, most games don’t make full use of the sidebar, leaving me to collapse it.

Anyway, The Dragon of Silverton Mine opts to simply move the buttons to the footer, which I like. It would probably be better if they were fixed in place so you don’t need to scroll to see them, just like how the sidebar is fixed. However, The Dragon does something else that’s really important: it keeps each passage reasonably short, even when it appends object text to the end of the page. So I like the layout overall.

Moving onto another topic of design, the game also uses italics to distinguish object links (which append text) from room links (which go to a new passage). Verses also visually distinguished links in a similar way. I don’t know where this started or how widespread it is, but I guess it’s good if it’s becoming more common.