Basilica de Sangre

You’re a demon and you have to save your mother from an unconventional convent. Luckily, while security is tight, you have the power to possess people, taking over their body. Most of the puzzles in the game revolve around finding the right person to possess in order to get some task done. To get to a certain location, you might need to find someone who is small, or strong, and so on. There are some object puzzles along the way, but nothing terribly difficult.

This is the second Quest game I played during the 2018 IF Competition -– after Space Punk Moon Tour –- and again I ran into a host of parser issues, making me suspect that it’s Quest that is at fault rather than the individual authors. Here was a particularly frustrating sequence:

x crypt
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

enter crypt
I don’t understand your command.

go in crypt
You can’t go there.

in
The door to the crypt is paved over.

pull slab
You can’t pull it.

hit slab
You can’t hit it.

pull door
I can’t see that. (door)

x crack
There’s a large crack across the door to the crypt.

kick door
I don’t understand your command.

x slab
A large stone mausoleum, the door slab flanked by ersatz Greco-Roman columns and moldering marble cherubs. A large crack bisects the slab blocking the entryway to the crypt, deeply enough that a strong enough human could probably pull it down.

pull it down
I can’t see that. (it down)

Some of this could perhaps have been avoided by the author, e.g., by having ‘door’ as a synonym for ‘slab’ and giving better messages for pulling and hitting. But something like that last error is presumably a weakness in Quest; Inform would have printed a much more sensible error message, something like “I only understood you as far as wanting to pull the slab.” Be that as it may, parser issues did not really impact my enjoyment as much as I feared, since the majority of the game can be traversed using just a few simple verbs, of which “possess” is the most important. (Although I did spend some minutes trying to “enter boat” in different ways before clicking on the object suggested a rather non-standard verb.)

The puzzles are of the right difficulty, and I like the fact that most of them are themed around the possession mechanic. The story was enjoyable as well, especially the way the demons are portrayed. I do think more could have been done with the world building: we’ve got a very special location here, but most of the rooms are a bit boring –- they feel as if they were pasted in from a ‘cloister template’ rather than having been designed as this specific convent.

All in all, pretty solid stuff. It didn’t blow me away, but I enjoyed it and have no major complaints.