Alchemist's Gold

by Garry Francis profile

Fantasy
2022

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Number of Ratings: 12
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- Edo, August 17, 2023

- Ms. Woods, July 10, 2023

- dgtziea, February 28, 2023

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Nice to play on C64 emulator, January 27, 2023
by Denk
Related reviews: Inform, punyinform, C64

In this game you are going to steal gold from an alchemist. This is a fun little game which experienced players can probably beat in less than an hour. It was written with PunyInform so I decided to play it with a C64-emulator (VICE) using the Ozmoo interpreter.

Parser:
There were responses to most commands and the parser was nudging me in the right direction if I should rephrase a command.

Atmosphere:
Nice writing (not too brief, not too verbose) and a nice setting gives a fine atmosphere.

Cruelty rating: Tough
The game can become unwinnable it seems but you are more or less told when it happens so you can load an earlier save.

Puzzles:
For experienced players this is an easy game. The map you find in the game was quite original, whereas most of the other puzzles were more standard.

Overall:
A short but entertaining game, though it is quite easy. And everything worked well with the Ozmoo interpreter including the ASCII-map.

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 28, 2022

- E.K., September 28, 2022

A smallish, polished heist game using traditional puzzles, September 7, 2022

by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game has you explore a forest and a small house to rob an alchemist of his gold.

The motivations and storyline are lightly sketched, as is much of the scenery. The focus is on the core parser experience: taking items, using them, a maze (with a map), keys and doors. There's no real surprises here: the goal is to recreate the feeling of games past, not to innovate.

Overall, it succeeds at its intended goal, and is polished and functionally descriptive. I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

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- Jade68, August 21, 2022

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A low-friction puzzlefest, August 8, 2022
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2022

There are a lot of different qualities that can mark out a piece of IF as having old-school sensibilities – two-word parsers, Zarfian cruelty, minimalist implementation – but there’s one that’s perhaps the most basic: you’re just out to get some treasure, man. Alchemist’s Gold is about one man’s quest to get an alchemist’s gold, unsurprisingly enough, with no more motivation than the protagonist having heard the rumors that this fellow’s figured out the whole Philospher’s Stone business, and wanting to have the wherewithal to dress like one of the nobility. Jean Valjean we ain’t, but given the style of game here on display, this bourgeois-materialist social climbing is entirely apt.

As to the rest of the aforementioned signifiers, Alchemist’s Gold is fairly easygoing, while still being recognizably a text-adventure-not-IF affair. The implementation is mostly robust, one of the unwinnable situations is clearly signposted, and though the puzzles aren’t brainteasers they’re satisfying to solve (there are also integrated hints, though fair warning that they provide no guidance for the final puzzle, where the wrong move can also lock you out of winning but without the notice you get in the other situation). There’s one technically impressive bit, which is a maze – but the trick is that you can find a map, nicely rendered in ASCII, which makes traversal easy. So it feels like a modern take on an old-school design, which makes for some pleasant adventuring.

I could end things there and I think it’d be an adequate review – the game you’re picturing after reading the above paragraph is pretty much the game Alchemist’s Gold is, a fun way to while away half an hour that isn’t trying to make much of an impression beyond that – but just to pad out the word count, I’ll expand on some of the pieces I glancingly ran through.

On implementation, the game uses the PunyInform library, which from my understanding is a stripped-down version of Inform 6 that helps games run more easily on retro platforms. Despite this, I didn’t run into places where I felt like the parser or implementation were too primitive to be enjoyable – there were definitely times when the parser returned an error rather than automatically figuring out what I wanted to do (like, UNLOCK DOOR giving a “with what?” prompt rather than selecting the only key in my inventory) but this fits the vibe. And while there aren’t a lot of extraneous actions that have much effect, you can still do stuff like try to talk to the animals and otherwise mess around with pieces of the game that have nothing to do with solving the central puzzles. The one annoyance I ran into is that various actions I’m used to not taking any time, including out of world actions like INVENTORY and HELP still use up a turn, which made a time-sensitive situation late in the game more of a pain than it needed to be.

As for puzzle fairness and the possibility of getting into unwinnable states – so midway through the game, you get a single-use item that can get you through any of three locked doors, and if you pick the wrong one, you’ll be stuck. But the game is kind enough to tell you this if you make an incorrect guess, so it’s easily fixed with an UNDO. I kinda question whether this kind of artificiality is any better than just designing the game to avoid these kinds of situations, but I get that this sort of thing is part of the sub-genre’s tropes, and better the awkward warning than nothing. As mentioned, the final puzzle can also be rendered unwinnable – I don’t think this would be a big deal for most players who’ll largely be barreling through the game in one sitting, but I put it aside for a day before wrapping up which meant I’d forgotten an important detail by the time I got to the finale, which made me struggle, and if I’d made my save a single turn later than when I did, I’d have had to replay the whole game over. Again, the issue’s unlikely to come up, and replaying would have been quick, so I think this is all fine.

And just to circle back to the opening – yeah, the protagonist sure seems like a jerk. Besides the whole motiveless malice thing that drives the action, there’s also an early sequence where he befriends a cute woodland creature, then delivers him to a terrible fate (Spoiler - click to show)(though as a vegetarian, I might be oversensitive here – maybe the idea of squirrel stew is meant to be comedic?). There’s a certain unity of character here, reinforcing the idea that this is not someone you should ever ask to housesit, especially if you have valuables or pets, and again, amoral acquisitiveness is a hallmark of the PCs in many early pieces of IF (I’ve enjoyed Drew Cook’s recent exegesis of the colonialist themes in Zork, for example ). But there’s a certain naivety to those chthonic figures that makes things go down easier when they’re revisited – or maybe it’s just that the devilish puzzles and recalcitrant parser provide sufficient distraction from the unattractive selfishness on display? If that’s the case, perhaps reducing the friction from old-school designs, as Alchemist’s Gold successfully manages, has some unanticipated downsides.

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- VanishingSky (Nanjing, China), July 19, 2022

A Light Puzzle Game, July 17, 2022

If you are looking for a light puzzle game for the sake of light puzzles, this is a relatively short game that is solidly coded, intuitive, and we (ClubFloyd) got through it quickly but not too quickly. The title and plot seemed intriguing, but are ultimately a thin veneer for the puzzles. Our (spoiler-filled) transcript is at this link.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fantastic old-school parser adventure, July 4, 2022
by jkj
Related reviews: parsercomp 2022

# Alchemist's Gold: Fantastic old-school parser adventure

> Concept by Lucian Blebea and Mike Manard.
> Game design and coding by Garry Francis.
> Play testing by Christopher Merriner, Dee Cooke, Edo Rajh, Jade J Aincioa, Phi> l Riley, Rovarsson and Stu Dobbie.

(Spoiler - click to show)
This is an old-school parser adventure where you have to get the alchemist's gold. It features a medium sized map of about 20 locations, not including a forest maze.

I really enjoyed playing this. The game has fantastic attention to detail. Almost everything i tried had descriptions and explanations.

The game mechanic is well thought through and the writing good. There are only a few places where you can go wrong and "die", but "undo" fixes this nicely.

The puzzles work well. I was stuck for a while escaping from the house, thinking it had to do with the log, fireplace, sack or window. But it's not. perhaps these are there deliberately for distraction. But generally the difficulty balance is good as i didn't resort to hints or walkthrough.

The game features a maze, but gives you an ASCII map to navigate it. Thankfully, this made it interesting rather than frustrating. I found the ASCII map diagram a bit weird at first, but it soon made sense.

I had no real problems with the game system, although it would have been nice to have clickable links and word completion for input. Some illustrations would also be nice to add atmosphere.

Some silly things i tried were amusing because they were handled, such as;

```
> stand on chair
You've been trudging through the forest all day. If you were to stand on the lounge chair, you would leave muddy footprints all over it. Be a little more respectful.

> hide
This is no time for playing hide and seek.
```

A few other things came out a bit wrong, probably due to default handlers. Examples:

```
> remove wire
You're not wearing the fence.

> stroke squirrel
The squirrel is soft and cuddly like a child's teddy bear.
> stroke shepherd
You don't feel anything unexpected.

> x axle
You get down on your hands and knees to look under the cart. Yep, it's certainly got a broken axle. That cart won't be going anywhere any time soon.
> mend it
That's not broken.

> snuff candle
That's not a verb I recognise.
> extinguish candle
You blow out the candle.

> light it
(with the lit candle)
The log is too large to light with a mere candle. You would need to chop it up into smaller pieces or get some kindling to start a fire.
> chop log
You would achieve nothing by this.
```

Help and hints are boilerplate messages rather than in context. Eg.

```
> hint
Examine everything you find and draw a map.
```

Right!

There is a `score` command to report progress, which neatly adds to 100% when complete.


In conclusion, a detailed and nicely implemented enjoyable game and well recommended if you like fantasy parser games. Perhaps add some hints or clues and i couldn't find a walkthrough (although there may well be one).

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