Rescue at Quickenheath

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 2 Write a review

A swashbuckling tale of adventures and embassies led by two intrepid highway robbers deeply in love with each other, Rescue at Quickenheath is a thrilling Twine game with rich worldbuilding and memorable interactions.

You are Valentine and your mission is to save your beloved Aubrey from execution. But first, the game asks you for your gender and then for your love interest's. I find the idea of "be gay, do crimes" appealing, so I made them a nonbinary x lesbian couple. With that out of the way, my player character arrives in Quickenheath ready to save their loved one.

The game feels like it has a big world, even though in retrospect the game is quite linear. It accomplishes this by having a few places to go that open up to newer places after completing a few puzzles. Progression feels great and you get more and more juicy worldbuilding details. By the time I finally got to the infodumps, I was already engaged with the world, so I was happy to learn more about the inner politics of fairies and humans.

There are a few contrived scenes that exist to keep the game moving, and I kinda like it. The fairy embassy scene (Spoiler - click to show)where the ambassador decides to give you access to the fairy world is an obvious example and the game seems to recognize that, but I didn't mind it as much as I would've thought. This scene, while inelegant, makes sure the player keeps engaged with the drama of the story, and I believe that a few scenes that don't make much realistic sense is better than many dull scenes to make it work in a story like this. I'm glad that the author understands pacing so well and I think it adds to the atmosphere of an adventure-romance game.

The puzzles are a bit silly, but they are inoffensive and short enough that they are fine. The game will give you solutions if you mess them up too much anyway. And the Twine styling, while simple, is effective and easy to read. The fonts are easy to read on my phone at night and I just found it a breezy game to play.

Rescue at Quickenheath is the kind of game I'd be happy to recommend to newcomers of interactive fiction. It has enough drama, comedy, complexity, and most importantly gay shit that it can be a crowdpleaser. I personally want to see more gay interactions in this game, and that is always a sign of a good game.

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This game hooked me with the premise and vibes on the Spring Thing page, and it definitely delivered! I was drawn in right away by the lovely presentation, with a fun old-fashioned font for the title screen and pleasant spring-like colors. (The UI is well done throughout, with in-game documents set off with different fonts/colors.) The beginning clearly establishes the PC’s goal, and then it’s up to you to get to work accomplishing it!

This is a Twine game with a world model, so there are various locations you can visit and items you can try using in different situations. I enjoyed the puzzlely elements, which were simple enough that they didn’t slow down the story’s momentum. The game also balanced imbuing the choices with a sense of stakes (at one point I certainly thought I’d messed up and was in for a “game over”!) and leaving room for experimentation. The worldbuilding was fun (especially the details of the fae embassy), and the writing suits the PC in a way that often made me smile—e.g., “Your heart lifts at the sound, like a string of pearls from around a rich person’s neck.” It’s altogether a very polished work.

A personal quibble is the selectable gender (of both the PC and the LI). I'd assumed based on the characters' names and the LGBT tag that they were both women, and "lady thieves" seemed like a very fun premise, a la Lady Thalia, so I was disappointed to find that their genders were blank slates. In cases like this, where gender is the only facet of the character the player gets to choose and where it has no effect on the game beyond what pronouns and labels get used in the text, I’d always prefer to have characters that the author wrote with pre-established genders (or lack thereof) in mind, because those characters tend to feel more real to me.

On to some more mechanical things, in the latter half of the game, once you’ve (Spoiler - click to show)entered Fairy, there's much less autonomy in where to go or what approach to take, so it felt much more on rails. I also found it odd that the game didn’t acknowledge some of the information the PC (Kit) finds—(Spoiler - click to show)when you read Aubrey’s journal she all but says that she’s in love with Kit, but Kit doesn't react or acknowledge that in any way. Same with the letter to Aubrey that starts “Dear Sister”—despite this clear indication, Kit doesn't seem to know that the letter-writer is Aubrey’s sibling. Finally, I would have liked to learn more about Kit’s backstory and motivations, as they remained largely a mystery throughout, and as mentioned above I always love a richly detailed character!

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