Forbidden Lore

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Standard TADS Disclaimer: I am a TADS-stan. Reader, calibrate your assessment of my impartiality as you see fit.

This is a TADS jam about uncovering a deceased relative’s knowledge of a world’s secret history. It is AMBITIOUS in its aims. It is creating a pseudo-history of magic and prophecy in a library of reference materials, that you, the player, will read. It does so many hard things really, really well. It presents the player with multiple shelves of books, each with multiple tomes of interest, many with multiple relevant facts that build on each other in a patchwork narrative of history. And it improbably does it with minimal confusion. What could be a bottomless pit of disambiguation between shelves, books, titles and facts, for me, was instead a deeply responsive hierarchy of unique naming conventions, sly context assumptions and effective mnemonic shorthands. Despite continually referencing and re-referencing these things I almost never got tripped up in the wrong objects or dissonant responses. It honestly is kind of a technical tour de force just managing all those similar but different things.

Ok, I just said I was never tripped up. Crucially, I said by object reference. Tripped up on LORE, well, that is a whole different thing. This is a work whose lore includes country names, religious organization names, Important People names, NPC names, magic spell names - every last one of them made up. They are thankfully not similar to each other, much, but they ARE Fantasy Letter Salad. They are ALSO unforgiving in spelling, meaning when you need reference them (and manage not to confuse a place name for a character name or somesuch), you might type it in three or four times before getting it right. You will find yourself typing endless variations of >ask eyveru about kardevat

The lore itself is interesting enough, as these things go, but remember was dispensed piecemeal through exhaustive combing of maybe two dozen pretend books. Much like real academic study, the charge is in making connections between disconnected facts to drive new conclusions. Did you commit all those vowel-consonants to memory? Do you even remember which book provided which detail when future refresher is needed? No you did not and no you do not. This leaves you in an unenviable position: knowing there are details you need for the next puzzle, but having no idea where to find them again. So now… do you do ANOTHER FULL PASS of the library, hunting out the details you need?

Yes. Yes you do.

At this point, it inescapably starts to resemble homework. So much (re)reading, probably some note-taking to keep things straight, heaven forbid any misspellings on the way. All to tease out byzantine details and connections that you can turn into actionable conclusions! If you are clamoring for an ancient text academia simulator, Lore has you covered. It isn’t opaque, it’s reasonably clear what needs scratching. It’s just a chore to churn through the reference materials to find it. For me, it quickly became apparent that if I wanted anything to write about beyond library science after my two hour playthrough, I better consult the hint system.

This carried me for a while, past the virtual paper cuts of virtual page turning, but then other artifacts started rearing. The early ones were pretty inconsequential - an important NPC in a room described as unoccupied; weird posture changes. Then actual gameplay artifacts came up: being told you don’t know where something is, but being required to point another object at it and succeeding just by >point X at Y Then, there were HINT artifacts, where the game seemingly accepted a puzzle solution, but the hint system seemed ignorant of it and required a DIFFERENT solution.

Until finally, catastrophically, the hint system broke entirely. Going to the well once too often yielded

[Runtime error: string is too long
]

and repeat engagement responded with a cold “Nothing obvious happens.” The safety net had shredded. I was near the end of my timer at that point anyway, but hoo boy that seemed pretty final.

For all that, it would be inaccurate to say the game was a slog. In spite of all the mechanical slogging, there IS a charge in connecting unconnected facts. The puzzle play and emergent lore was entertaining, to a point anyway. The NPCs were kind of fun, and the physical descriptions and magic were cool. There were legitimate Sparks of Joy throughout. I think it may come down to are you a Tolkien reader that immerses in faux history, or are you a noob D&D player that just wants to throw fireballs? The former will find a lot to dig into here, in way more than 2 hrs, and if they successfully bypass the hint system maybe be ok? There are technical accommodations to make with it though, and you probably know yourself enough to decide if the lore is worth it. If not, it may be more… FORBIDDING LORE. Eh? Eh?

Played: 9/11/24
Playtime: 2hrs, looks like 1/2 threats defeated but hints disagreed
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/intrusive lookups, bug and lore
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, Imma go lob some Magic Missiles

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Anyone who’s played a mainstream video game in the 2020s has, I’d wager, had occasion to bemoan the way modern games don’t trust the player. To dig into a new game is to be besieged by pop-ups overexplaining basic mechanics and controls, and you often need to wade through an hour-long tutorial before you’re allowed to take the controls for real. Even then, objective markers, GPS-style maps, comprehensive hyperlinked quest journals, highlighted keywords, and other accessibility features can make you feel less like an adventurer and more like a tween being carefully shepherded through an amusement-park ride.

There are rewards to be had for dialing back this new-normal level of hand-holding and reembracing the what-the-heck-am-I-doing flailing of earlier years, especially now that we’ve got wikis and reddit instead of that one kid at the playground who knew the Konami code – witness the success of Dark Souls and its ilk. But there are risks, too, and Forbidden Lore demonstrates both sides of the coin.

Let me start by saying that the premise here is a classic but, in my opinion, dynamite. Your grandfather has died and left you free rein of his library; as it turns out, he was a powerful sorcerer, and as you poke through the stakes and read lots and lots of books, you’ll turn up his secrets – finding his magical paraphernalia, making friends with his familiar – and also use your new-found power to uncover mystical threats to all of humanity, which you’ll likewise foil through careful cross-referencing and following trails of references from one tome to another to another. IF people love books, or at least I do, and this particular flavor of bibliomantic-tinged occult horror has rarely been pursued with such focus: there are easily dozens of volumes to consult here, and what starts as a deeply-implemented one-room game expands in unexpected ways.

Of course, they’re partially unexpected because Forbidden Lore never bothers to explain itself. The game starts you off without any concrete objective, just saying that your grandfather had been on the track of some mystery that he hoped you’d be able to solve. But there’s no prompt directing you to a HELP or ABOUT command (though there is a walkthrough), and even as you start to get a sense of what said mystery might be, you’re given very few prompts towards any specific goal. So you’re very much working without a net, and when I succeeded in figuring things out, I definitely felt real accomplishment – I had a real aha moment when I realized how I could learn a particular mystical language, or intuited from a glancing reference in a book a way I might strengthen my magical powers (beyond solving specific puzzles, some sections of the game appear to be gated off until you gain sufficient juice by collecting artifacts or otherwise charging up your mojo – it helps that you don’t appear to need to find every one, though).

But the game also left me twisting in the wind a lot of the time due to a failure to properly explain itself. The books themselves, while Forbidden Lore’s biggest draw, are also the greatest culprit here. Of course one of the first commands I typed was X BOOKS, which tells you:

"Bookcases consume the entirety of the north wall, continuing on both sides of the door and flanking the desk. Some of the books on the far wall are written in Aulerian, which you learned in your youth, while others are in languages you do not know. Most of the books are sorted according to the region they concern, with the third bookcase containing those about the Illuvian empire. Introductory texts seem to be kept on a row of shelves above the desk."

So I read that to indicate that there’s a case written in Aulerian and other languages, a second focused on regions (you learn the names of several by peeping at maps on your granddad’s desk), a third about the Illuvians, and then the introductory texts. And X AULERIAN, X [name of region], X ILLUVIAN, and X INTRODUCTORY all spit out descriptions of a set of books along with a few particular titles you can read. Straightforward enough, right?

Nope. For one thing, progress requires you to somehow intuit that there aren’t four bookcases here but seven; what’s worse, even for the ones given more descriptive labels you have to use numbers to refer to them, since X THIRD reveals that there’s an additional set of demonological studies that go unmentioned if you just type X ILLUVIAN.

Even once I got over that significant initial hump, there were similar implementation oversights that brought my playthrough to a screeching halt. The syntax to actually use the magical powers I was reading about is never made clear, and several times I went to the walkthrough only to come back scratching my head, unsure how I was supposed to know that just reading about fire-priests was enough to let me SHOOT FIRE whenever I wanted. And there are a couple of puzzles where guess-the-verb issues wind up being actively misleading: (Spoiler - click to show) I already think the description of the statue needs to be better clued to indicate that it’s light enough to be manhandled, but PUSH STATUE just gives a default error message rather than pointing to the required PUSH STATUE INTO CHASM; similarly, I’d figured out the moon-glyph puzzle but was stymied by my inability to get PUSH SEQUENCE or ENTER SEQUENCE or anything like that to work, pushing me again to the walkthrough to learn ENTER SEQUENCE ON IMPLEMENTS was required.

I’m not sure if this is yet another game that didn’t get much testing – no testers are listed in the credits at least – but it’s a shame that these rough patches weren’t smoothed over. The good bits here are often very very good, and outside of the issues I’ve flagged above, the weak spots are relatively small: I wished the occultism had drawn more on real-world stuff than made-up fantasy nouns, and the writing could have been a bit more flavorful, but these are minor points. But there’s a fine line between giving the player the space to experiment and figure things out, and just requiring them to read the author’s mind, and Forbidden Lore strays across that line too often – hopefully the Comp can provide enough feedback for a later release that better strikes the balance.

(based on the IFComp 2024 version)

You’re in your grandfather’s library, looking to bring his studies into the arcane to an end, and carry out the implied task that reveals itself through the research.

When entering the library, I had expected it to be the starting point of an oldschool quest to the Illuvian Empire. It soon became clear that, aside from a few short magic-teleportations, the bulk of the game is the library.

Instead of grand halls, twisty little passages and ever-winding corridors to navigate, you must make your way through the shelves and heaps and stacks of books and tomes. Instead of using a compass-rose to traverse a map, you must sift through layers of implementation during your search for the necessary bits of information and, to prepare you for what may come, for sources of magic to enhance your powers and protection.

This design makes Forbidden Lore a bit of a textual hidden-object game. Most libraries in IF-games have a few books mentioned by title, signalling that those are the important ones. Here, the books named in the first layer of description, upon X BOOKS, comprise but a small fragment of the total of books you need. You’ll need to examine separate sections of shelves, individual thematic categories in the bookcases, parts of parts of parts of the library.
There’s at least one game-critical non-book object in the room that is hidden in a similar manner. I only stumbled across it buried in an object-description while fastidiously examining all the nouns. ((Spoiler - click to show)The armchair is standing on a rug.)

Now, I enjoyed this. Digging through layers of description and finding new books to read, and then trying to infer what to do with the information I learned was fun for me. However, I would have liked it if the nouns were a bit more distinguishable: in place of expecting the player to X BOOKS ON DESK, it would have been easier to find the right command if, instead of another pile of books, there had been only rolls of parchment on the desk, enabling X ROLLS.

The few trips outside the library are welcome intermezzos, they open up the space of the game and cut through the catacomb-like feel of that single book-filled room. The final such outside trip leads to the endgame, and it was there that I felt let down.

The player’s expected to enter a bunch of commands that were not foreshadowed enough or introduced in some sort of training-wheel circumstances. After checking the walkthrough, I did think : “Oh, yes, that was mentioned in one of those tomes I ploughed through in the beginning.” The amount of references and information in the books makes it difficult for that one particular piece of knowledge to stick though, especially without a chance to practice beforehand.

I also noticed more disambiguation failures (“Did you mean the (Spoiler - click to show)shrine or the (Spoiler - click to show)druidic shrine?”) in the endgame, which makes me suspect this game was finished while Mr D.E. Adline was looking over the author’s shoulder.

I really liked the detailed library search, the hints and glimpses of ancient history, exotic cultures, powerful spells in the myriad of tomes. Player-friendliness could be improved by clearing up unintuitive commands and more obviously distinguishable nouns.

Good game.