Unseelie

This is unavoidably going to sound like damning with faint praise, but Unseelie is really good for an untested parser game made in a week. Like, there is a reason this is not how anyone writes parser games these days, outside of speed IF and other such contexts where having even a minimally-playable game at the end counts as an achievement – beyond the fact that it’s unfinished, with a plot that ends just when things are starting to get interesting and a solid quarter of game’s puzzle paraphernalia going unused, there are bumps in the road a-plenty, from underclueing to a frustratingly-invisible disambiguation issue that almost prevented me from getting through the final set of challenges. But! While presenting a reasonably old-school puzzle-dungeon, the design is generally welcoming and engaging, with fairly robust implementation, a couple of distinctive setting elements living up proceedings, and unpretentious, confident prose that knows how to lift up an evocative detail. Even if it’s hard to exactly recommend in its current state, Unseelie can already be a lot of fun if you go into it with the proper mindset, and if it’s ever finished, it could well be something great.

As mentioned, this is a slightly old-fashioned kind of game where you wander around an underground world featuring magic – largely mushrooms with various unearthly powers, plus I suppose the woman whose portal-spell transports you into the aforementioned catacombs to begin with, though that’s more of a plot device than an element in the game as such – and anachronistic technology (plumbing, key cards, pressure plates). You’re not given much direction beyond a general desire to explore and hopefully escape back to your own reality, but there are enough obvious barriers and things to poke at that I found myself getting into the swing of things soon enough.

The writing definitely helps. It focuses attention on gameplay-relevant elements while not neglecting to set the mood, like this location description:

"The corridor ends here to the west in a metal gate beyond which you can see the outdoors—though a part of the outdoors apparently teeming with giant mushrooms and wickedly thorned plants. The sky outside is an odd shade of lavender that skies should definitely not be. A single thorny bramble extends through the gate into the corridor, winding along the stone floor."

It hits a deceptively hard-to-nail sweet spot, I think – these kinds of games work best when they don’t feel like bare mechanical challenges, but also can get frustrating if overly-elaborate language obfuscates the interactive bits you use to solve the puzzles.

Speaking of, the puzzle structure is rewarding, with new areas opening up as you explore and overcome obstacles, and a couple of moments when previously confusing or useless things come into focus, most notably when you reach the sole real NPC, who’s implemented fairly deeply and can tell you what all the fungi you’ve been finding can do. There’s also a fairly broad variety of things to do for what’s a relatively small game, from straightforward fetch quests and use-x-on-y puzzles to some that involve slightly more complex object manipulation and others that focus on the aforementioned NPC (a prisoner who promises to help you if you free him) or shifting the behavior of an animalistic native of this strange place. There’s nothing that made me slap my head in novelty and surprise, but equally, none felt illogical or like busywork, albeit there were a few where the clueing was noticeably thin – just the sort of thing that testing is good at smoothing out.

And yes, now that we’re talking of testing we have to come to the critiques, few of which I suspect will come as a surprise to the author given the caveats in the ABOUT text. While the implementation here is fairly robust, in terms of attention to detail, there are also a good number of rough patches – I’ll go into detail on the bug I mentioned above, since while it comes late in the game, spoiling the puzzle solution it pertains to will be a positive good to most players. See, at one point the complex quest chain to free the prisoner requires you to get a hypodermic needle that he’s got in the cell with him, due to some Geneva-Convention-violating stuff his captors got up to. But every attempt I made to take the needle or get him to hand it over ended in failure, with him annoying declaring that the needle couldn’t possibly be useful when I had a very clear understanding of what I needed it for. Turns out, I was on the right track, but the game was confused because there was also a needle-like thorn in the room, and the parser was automatically assuming I meant the latter rather than the former – referring to the HYPODERMIC rather than the NEEDLE cleared things up right away. Again, it’s a small quality of life fix that testing would immediately reveal the need for – but the lack of it wasted half an hour and burned quite a bit of goodwill.

(Oh, while I’m dispensing spoilers, I might as well mention that from glancing at some other reviews at transcripts, many players seem to be missing that (Spoiler - click to show)you need to examine the gap in the control room).

What’s here isn’t at all unplayable, let me be clear, but it’s also clear what we’ve got is a really fun Zork-like reduced to only moderate fun-ness and lacking half or so of the plot by the vagaries of its creation. Given all that, Unseelie’s entry into the Back Garden rather than the main festival makes sense – and if that decision was the author’s desire to test the waters before committing to doing the work to finish the game, hopefully this review counts as clear evidence of the need for, and upside of, that work.