Crescent Sea Story

I've played a lot of Stewart Baker's games, and I usually associate him with lighthearted longform narrative-focused choice-based games.

This is a more serious choice-based game with a complex world map and a lot of navigation and some light tracking of objects. To me, it feels like an experiment in shifting tones, and so I'm framing my review with that mindset. That may be an incorrect interpretation, which may render parts of this review less valid.

In this game, you are on a sea, your memories shattered into several (visible) pieces and you have to visit the important locations of your life to remember and revive that part of your life. You learn about your experiences as a youth and as a powerful wizard, and can visit the islands in any order. The world map is navigated with compass directions, as are the individual islands. In each memory, you wander around completing tasks, often tasked with going to specific parts in the map one at a time. Some memories are much shorter. As you complete memories, you have some leeway in how to end them, which raises your score in one of three attributes.

I think recovering your memories as a powerful but defeated creature is a solid trope and works well here. It reminds me of the game Dreamhold, a parser game where you are similarly navigate a space collecting your past memories of a life involving magic and power.

The most effective parts of the game to me were the heavily unusual parts, like what happened to our childhood schoolfriend and what lies hidden below the caves we explore. The author has a talent for describing the truly unusual in an unsettling way.

I was less enthusiastic about the world model and compass navigation. There were large swathes of maps that were essentially 'Hallway D' (but the outdoors equivalent'. I remember something Adam Cadre wrote in a review of Galatea:

In interviews I've been asked to give potential IF authors out there advice, and one of my usual lines is, "The pieces of text you write are the player's reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding."

While this is choice-based and you don't need to think up commands, it still holds when it comes to discovering new text through exploration. Some of these descriptions could use some more excitement:

This hut is nothing special. Twenty strides by twenty, it holds whatever the village needs holding.

You can reach the veranda of your home to the south-east, while a dirt path leads south-west towards the main road.

This isn't universal advice; Wizard Sniffer has shockingly bare room descriptions and a lot of connecting hallways yet is still well-beloved, but that's mostly due to the large and lively cast that provides flavor in those rooms. (Sorry for the long digression!)

I chose to mostly focus on Despair, one of the three stats you start with. I enjoyed the freedom to choose what to focus on. I think there was one very minor bug near the end where, even though I had used despair the most (both getting and giving), the options I had to choose were ones the walkthrough indicated as applying to coldness. (Specifically, [spoiler]the trials I faced were fire and a rickety bridge, though my stats were 3 1 1 (D C R) and I spent 2 1 1 on the four islands.[/spoiler]

The overall plot is something I liked, and it felt like a replay would definitely be meaningful, since most islands have very different endings to the stories depending on you choice, and there's no back button (there are saves though). So I thought that part of the game was particularly well-constructed.