Ruined Temple

A tribe of goblins who’ve heretofore only been a nuisance have stepped up their raids, indicating that a new, deadly intelligence may be directing them. A doughty band of adventurers – the heroic fighter, mysterious elf, dedicated wizard, and loyal dwarf – has come together and tracked them to their hidden lair in a desecrated underground fane; they will face traps, vicious foes, and dark magic, before they finally reveal the truth behind the evil artifact thazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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Huh? What? What was that?

No, I’m awake, I’m definitely awake.

So yeah I don’t mean to be mean, but this is literally the hoariest premise in all of video games, and so far as I can tell Ruined Temple doesn’t put a single unique spin on the narrative. Every single plot point is a trope that was old before there was an A in AD&D, from the sniveling turncoat goblin to the beautiful ghost sending you on a fetch quest, and while a world outside the dungeon must be presumed to exist, nothing in the action of the game or the perfunctory introduction or more-perfunctory ending would lead you to assign the slightest significance to this fact. This is the kind of game that knows you’re not going to type THADIVUS or LORCASSA more than a couple times; they’ll answer to DWARF and ELF without raising a fuss.

Where the game distinguishes itself is in the robustness and the opacity of its implementation. See, this TADS game has you control the whole party, who move as a blob, using the CHARACTER, ACTION syntax to pick the person best suited for any particular task (once you pick someone, they thankfully stay in the driver’s seat until you tag another party member in). They’ve all got their default weapons, but also have a trick or two up their sleeves – the dwarf (I told you I wasn’t retyping his name) can pick locks, the elf has a magic flute, and so on. A bunch of the challenges you run into are straightforward combats where just wading in will get you through, but most of them are puzzles that hinge not on object manipulation, but using the unique skills of each member of the group. There’s nothing especially novel here – again, it’s DnD tropes all the way down – but you’ve got a noticeably broader palette of action than is typical in this sort of game.

The flip side of this is that the player is left to grope their way to understanding what capacities they actually have, with just about no hand-holding. There are a few oblique hints in the descriptions of the characters that there are certain unique verbs that will allow them to leverage abilities that aren’t explicitly disclosed, and when this works, it can be undeniably fun: figuring out that the elven ranger can tame animals made me feel very clever! But it’s a superficial kind of clever, because there’s nothing diegetic about it; the elf and her friends all surely know that she can do this, so the fact that she didn’t for quite a while as I flailed about trying to figure out what to do lends the sequence an air of inadvertent comedy in retrospect (Ruined Temple compares unfavorably to the author’s previous effort, Imperial Throne, in this respect: in that game, you were often similarly trying stuff without any idea whether you could actually do it and what would happen if you could, but since that was simulating a fantasy version of pre-modern kingship, that felt like a reasonable simulation of the experience). And unfortunately there are many places where there just isn’t any prompting, and the player is left to rely on their genre-savviness or, more likely, the walkthrough (seriously, if there was any clue at all that ELF, CREATE MOONLIGHT was a possible action, I sure missed it).

What’s worse, the game is fairly buggy, which made me wary of too much experimentation. There are plot-critical items missing descriptions, a weird disambiguation prompt in the library led me to a confusing sequence-break, I got a stack overflow when searching a desk, and the inventory system – which isn’t pooled between the characters but tracked individually – sometimes seemed to move things around in confusing ways:

>kyra, give necklace to aedron

Kyra could not give the necklace.

>drop necklace

(first taking the necklace)

Lossdant was sure to keep the necklace, which was clearly an impressive piece of jewelry.

Dropped.

…OK but so where is the necklace supposed to be now?

There’s a kernel of something fun here, don’t get me wrong. In addition to the appealingly flexible implementation, the prose consistently lands at “better-written than a Forgotten Realms novel needs to be”. Here’s a random example:

Somehow, the magicienne was able to dodge the phantom’s swings enough to get close. Seizing her moment, she struck. With a furious cry, Kyra forced her blade into the black, formless void where the creature’s face would have been. The monstrosity let out a piercing shriek as it collapsed. Kyra, too, slumped back, drained by her sudden daring. With that, the last of them was slain.

In other words, with some more testing (there are none listed in the about text) this could have been a really solid take on a classic genre with a few pleasing mechanical innovations; as it is, it’s still easy to recommend to anyone who like this sort of the thing, with the caveat that you really shouldn’t hold back from checking the walkthrough as soon as you’re not having fun.