The Dragon of Silverton Mine

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.