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A girl and her goat, November 28, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
Oof. Despite being a sucker for libraries, knowledge, and (presumably) libraries of knowledge, I did not get on well with this one. The pitch is compelling: you’ve found a magical shrine that plays host to an all-knowing spirit, a collection of all the world’s wisdom, and a masked library attendant with a secret, and now you can ask to read any book you want. Wow! That is a lovely idea, and if the realities of implementation mean that of course the promise of “any book” can’t come close to being delivered, at least it’s a compelling illusion.
Sadly, after establishing the setup, the game quickly began to lose me. Partially this is because there are only three books on offer – specifically, two short-ish ones that establish the background lore of this fantasy world’s two major nations, delivered in DnD-manual style, and one long one that’s just the story of how your character came to the library, which of course you already would know and wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Partially this is because the prose doesn’t really live up to the fantastical premise:
"Your breath catches sharply in your chest as the last of the incantations die on the biting wind that whips around you. Streams of pale moonlight flicker in past the broken beams overhead, sending a cascade of sprawling patterns through the old, fractured glass. Ancient words scrawled onto a faded scroll bleed off the edges of their crumbling paper, spilling a black mist onto the cold stone floors which slips and slides into the dark corners of this dilapidated temple."
Adjectivitis, unvarying sentence structure, small grammar errors; it’s not awful but it’s not a high point either, and since the game is almost entirely walls of text – there are some engaging choices towards the endgame, but for the most part you’re either picking “turn to next page” or “turn to next section” – I really found myself wishing for better prose.
As for the content, I found the DnD manuals competent but rather uninspired. One nation is fantasy China, with the serial numbers not even filed off – the provinces are literally just real-world Chinese provinces. It’s got a whiff of Orientalism to it (did you know the lands of the East are ruled by “an ancient and magical dynasty”, that the people are “deeply spiritual and honor their ancestors above all else”, that they “practice martial arts as a way of harnessing [chi] energy”, and are ruled from a capital that is “a place of intrigue”?) but I think this is innocent; the country’s multiculturalism and openness to immigration are held up as a strength, and contrasted with the xenophobia of the western nation (which is Europe-flavored but not a direct insert of anyplace in particular; it’s just general fantasy bollocks).
It’s all serviceable enough, but unexciting to slog through, all the more so when the author occasionally loses track of the lore (there’s a bad-guy cult alternately called the “Band of the Dark Sun” and “Band of the Black Sun”) or draws too-direct inspiration from pop culture (there were a bunch of killings at a recent marriage, which has become known as the “Crimson Union”). And none of it actually winds up being all that relevant to the main part of the game, which is your character’s autobiography – the setting details are sufficiently straightforward that they could have easily been explained in the course of the story.
This bit does have some zip to it; it’s maybe paced a little slowly, and sometimes drops to bottom-line narration when writing out a scene would have been more effective. It also isn’t self-aware of how funny the premise sounds (you go on a world-shaking quest to find a cure for the ailing goat that’s your last link to your family); it’s offbeat enough to work well, but I think needed more time establishing the stakes and emotional connection between the main character and the goat. But once it gets moving, it executes YA-style fantasy novel tropes solidly enough; this isn’t my genre of choice, but even I got a kick out of the various double-crosses in the pirate section. Then things kicked up again after the story wraps, as the protagonist does face an actually-challenging set of decisions without a clear moral compass to make their choices easy.
As a result, my view of the game improved as it went on, but it’s still hard to recommend this one. The author’s got enthusiasm and some talent, but the game we’ve got feels too much like a first draft – there’s a lot of unnecessary cruft and an awkward frame that doesn’t cleanly mesh with the main substance of the story, along with prose that needs some polishing. Of course, every great game started out as a terrible first draft, so this is no bad thing by itself – but hopefully for their next game, the author will be able to spend more time figuring out what they need to say and what they don’t need to say, and revising their work to foreground the most compelling parts.