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Review
A promising start! The premise here is that you are a student warrior poet, about to embark on a career of adventuring; however, just before graduation, your advisor steals a precious artefact and flees, so naturally you’re tasked with tracking him down to earn your degree. This game, the first of what I hope will be many instalments, takes place in the port city you’ve followed him to. Explore the city, talk to its inhabitants, discover the professor’s next destination, and secure passage to pursue him further.
The highlight for me was the writing and the characters. The locations are interesting and varied, with engaging descriptions that capture the dynamic vibe of a bustling city and market, which makes exploration is enjoyable even when there isn’t much you can do yet in a particular place.
The game is generally really responsive to what you know and what you’ve seen. Conversations with NPCs use the TALK TO command and are of the type where, instead of picking a topic, the conversation simply happens based on your knowledge; if you’ve encountered relevant information you automatically share it. This is nice as it makes the interactions feel more natural and integrated into the narrative, and the author’s good at writing interesting dialogue. However, sometimes this system works a bit too smoothly, because my character is making connections before I do. For example, I talked to one character simply because they were there, and the character immediately goes oh I see you have something I need, can I trade it from you? – even though I hadn’t yet realised that was what I needed to do!
Many puzzles here are narrative and conversation-based and follow that pattern: you do something or find a clue, figure out who to approach with that information, and hopefully gain more clues in the ensuing conversation. The progression is generally smooth and satisfying once you’re on the right track; however, one minor complaint is that the system feels somewhat rigid. There’s essentially one main chain of conversations that drives the plot forward, which you start by finding a specific clue. Talking to people before getting that the info to prompt the relevant conversations usually doesn’t work, and I spent some time aimlessly wandering around until I looked at the walkthrough and realised I hadn’t examine something thoroughly enough. This is a downside of the otherwise good conversation system, you can’t just go to the inn or the docks and ask if anyone has seen someone matching the professor’s description, as one might expect.
To mix things up here’s also a combat system that I found pretty fun. It’s simple to control – choose to attack with either a weapon or poetry magic and hope for a good roll. There are opportunities to increase your ability scores and acquire better weapons and armour, but the combat encounters feel fairly manageable even with the starting equipment. As a result, getting better weapons feels less about immediate necessity and more like preparing for the next stage of the adventure.
Overall, a very well put together experience, I’m very much looking forward to future installments.
