The Wise-Woman's Dog

(edit: This review is now for a slightly outdated version of the game.)

Your human is the wise woman of her village. She performs rituals and other services for the local people. But now she is sick and unresponsive with a curse of unknown origin. Who will heal her? As her faithful dog, this task has been placed on your canine shoulders.

Gameplay
I love this game.

I'll admit that I imagined it would be a generic plucky fetch-quest style game with a predictable yet endearing storyline. The Wise-Woman’s Dog blew my expectations out of the water with its complexity, mechanics, and dynamic world. We are transported back into the Bronze Age where we find ourselves amid the Hittite Empire.

Historically, it was believed that dogs could absorb magic, like a sponge. In the game, the dog protagonist literally carries spells and blessings to place on objects around the map. The mechanics illustrating this are the best part of the game. Due to your canine sense of smell, you can detect the presence of blessings and curses.

This is where your human stores the tools she needs for her job. There’s no latch or seal on it—she keeps it shut in a way only a wise-woman can open.

Or maybe an especially clever dog.

You can smell a security blessing lingering on it.

Excuse me while I rave about it.

The security blessing, for instance, keeps a chest sealed shut. Removing the blessing allows you to open it. The blessing can be applied elsewhere in the game to utilize its sealing effects. When inverted it becomes an insecurity curse with its own applications. With twelve (including inverted) possible spells to play with, the gameplay is full of possibility.

I applaud the implementation because it has features that make the gameplay as smooth as possible, particularly with spell management. Notably, there is a spell section that lists the location of your blessings/curses. With a single click, you can teleport yourself to the spell’s location or simply fetch the spell. In this case, the game automatically travels there, retrieves it, and returns to where you were standing. You can even have it inverted for you.

The security blessing on the city stela, in the city center, which holds something closed (fetch it); inverted, it holds something open (fetch and invert it)

I spent much of the gameplay marveling at this convenience. You can also use the clickable map at the top of the screen to travel and keep track of objects of interest scattered around. Nifty, since the dog protagonist can only carry one object at a time. But all of this you will know about if you’ve played the game.

There is some confusion regarding the primary objective in the city portion of the game, and by objective, I mean something more specific than Mission Save Your Human. Do we find someone who can identify the curse? Do we need a substance to make a cure? The answer is simple: (Spoiler - click to show)Acquire the gold amulet.

It wasn’t until I reached for the hints that I realized that the bulk of the gameplay is centered on (Spoiler - click to show)accumulating enough money to buy the amulet by collecting (or in some cases, stealing) valuable items to sell to a woman in the bazaar. The gold amulet was not just a small piece in a puzzle; It was the item you need to deal with your human’s curse.

Once this was clear, gameplay was smooth sailing. I didn’t need to (Spoiler - click to show)try to find answers about the curse. I just needed shekels! Objective identified, I was able to finish the game on my own. (Once you buy the gold amulet, the game is clear that you have everything you need to save your human.)

I liked that you don’t need to cover every puzzle to win the game, but there is still incentive to go beyond what’s required.

Story
Historical backstory
As a work of historical fantasy, The Wise-Woman’s Dog is a blend of historical facts and artistic license regarding Bronze Age culture, economics, politics, religion, technology, and more. It’s difficult to walk away from this game without learning something about this time in human history.

Throughout the gameplay there are green links that offer more historical information in the form of green-bordered info boxes. These were fantastic and full of insight without being too lengthy. Some even have pictures! They do a great job at explaining the terms (to name a few: pithos, stela, shekels) encountered in the game. They also clarify what parts of the game are based in historical accuracy and which lean towards artistic license.

The game’s lengthy description may be overwhelming, but the gameplay’s premise is not centered on understanding dates, places, conflict, and political figures. While it may be historical fiction, meeting its objectives does not require you to process a heavy backstory. And yet, there are plenty of opportunities to dive into historical background if you wish.

After casually reading the in-game fact boxes over several hours of gameplay I looked at the game’s description and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could follow it quite clearly. Not so dense after all!

The Wise-Woman’s Dog manages to maintain a light-hearted atmosphere by skirting around, though not outright ignoring, some of the not-so-pleasant realities of life during the Bronze Age. Subjects such as slavery, animal sacrifice, and violence are carefully handled. In fact, the author describes this game as “cozy,” and I agree with that.

Maybe next we’ll get a game set in the Iron Age.

Immediate story
I was expecting the gameplay to be infused with more immediate story. I thought that going to the city would mean learning about the curse, who put it on your Human, details about how the curse worked. The gameplay is instead (Spoiler - click to show) whittled down to acquiring the gold amulet. I don’t think this is a flaw, though, since the game opts for simplicity with the story to balance out the technicality of the puzzles.

Once you (Spoiler - click to show)have the gold amulet, the gameplay is more akin to a fun day at the market. A new section of the bazaar can even be discovered!

Characters
While details on our canine protagonist are limited, it’s hard not to feel smitten by their resourcefulness and determination. And while they do things that aren’t particularly dog-like, the writing always conveys the game’s world from a dog’s perspective. Surprisingly, (Spoiler - click to show)we never get a chance to interact with our Human after healing her. Are we a good dog? I need answers.

I found the characters to be dynamic and interesting, especially since they are of different social standings and skillsets. Some will even move to other parts of the map during the gameplay. I loved how (Spoiler - click to show)fixing the dam causes Iyali to rally the village children playing by the river to tell them the story of Tarhunt, a story that we can sit and listen to!

“Now! Who wants to hear a story?” Iyali raises her voice over the sound of the river, and the children come running.

As if she had to ask. This also serves as clever foreshadowing since we explore the Temple of Tarhunt in the city!

I like that we can (Spoiler - click to show) give Anzi a token for six goats so she can decide who to marry, even if we don’t get to see who she chooses. It would have been nice if she gave us another pudding :(

Visual design
The game has a light mode and dark mode which is always helpful for me since dark mode is easier on my eyes in terms of brightness. Light mode has black text and a light bronzed singed background that gives the impression of parchment paper. Dark mode is, well, self-explanatory: black background with tan text.

You might feel overwhelmed at all the colour-coded links and boxes on the screen, but you soon adapt to its appearance. Plus, there are additional appearance settings that you can tinker with. Options!

Conclusion
The Wise-Woman’s Dog is a game that reminds you of why you love interactive fiction, of why you choose to devote hours of your time to sitting and playing at a computer.

It’s fantastic in all departments: protagonist and NPCs, implementation, puzzle mechanics, and more. It gives the sense of an author going above and beyond to create a work that exceeds expectations. I have high hopes for it in this year’s IFComp.

This game is written in Dialog and can be played entirely using hyperlinks. It has a minimap at the top that can be used for navigation, persistent links at the bottom, context-sensitive links for the current object being utilized, and green links for trivia and definitions.

You play as a dog in the Hittite empire. Magic is real, and as a dog, you can absorb it and transmit it to other things (Not people though! That's actually against the law. Straight to jail, believe it or not).

You work for a wise-woman, but she has been afflicted by a curse! You need to help her, but you can't even get out of your own home. Once free, your world expands more and more. You can help friends and gain new curses and blessings in your large village, visit the capital and make money, and gain greater power than you thought possible.

Like Daniel Stelzer's other hyperlinked Dialog game about a dog interacting with the supernatural and their afflicted older woman master (Miss Gosling's Last Case), this game has context-sensitive tips and tutorial messages at the beginning, but they've been tuned to be less intrusive, which is nice. There is also a 'think' function that tells you what puzzles you can solve, and the minimap also does that automatically. That's helpful in this sprawling game with many options.

Puzzle difficulty was hit or miss with me. Several times I felt like there were several reasonable options that the author ruled out for what felt like arbitrary reasons to me. A common source of frustration for me was intuiting when a movable object could be affected by fragility or by wind (or the opposites). Rather than making puzzles simpler, the author has instead added a lot of hints (as mentioned above) and made most puzzles optional; for the two largest areas, you only need to reach a certain minimum number of puzzles solved before you can move on or win the game. This reminds me of math tests: is it better to have a test most people can get a high score on, or to make it very hard and then just 'curve' it significantly? This is a 'curved' game.

The background material on the Hittites was fascinating. One common theme was that words had one pronunciation but are written with symbols that have another pronunciation, which reminded me of kanji with Chinese and Japanese readings.

Overall, I found the game substantial and fun. I got stuck several times and used the hints about 4-5 times. This is also the first shady ancient copper merchant I've found in a game that wasn't Ea-Nasir.

In Haatti, furthest corner from the grace of Aratta, wanderers of the wastes without the light of Ashur, those Gutians driven back from Purattu by Shulmanu Ashared, a dog walks into a tavern and says, I can’t see a thing, let me fetch the visibility blessing from the stele. This turns out to be quite fun, with the game’s central mechanic allowing you to wander a teeming map sniffing out opportunities to precisely infuse spells to solve a tapestry of problems. In a wise design choice, you don’t need to solve all of them, and many of them can be solved variously, which rewards exploration by rendering it personal rather than rote.

What really makes these puzzles excel though is the lavishly textured historicity of the Hittite setting, which layers the spellplay inside an enchanting world. Almost every detail is drawn rigorously to evoke the Bronze Age in high fidelity. Rather than NPCs standing around a field doing farmerisms, we’re watching people busy on the last day of harvest reckoning with the payment of taxes as a complex logistical problem requiring significant labor, starting with how are we going to ship this: “Makeshift docks have been cobbled together at the edge of the river, planks and boards all lashed together to load the village’s taxes onto the barge.” This type of close inhabitance, with all the specificities of attention with which our ancestors would’ve solved the same problems, brings an ancient setting to life. We get an argument lyrically redolent with the timbres of these tensions uniquely, like two men arguing in a field about a missing sickle: “…you know what you’ve done, Zuwa? You’ve stolen the very moon out from my sky! Oh, my moon, my crescent moon, my beautiful harvest moon! How I used to wax and wane her through the fields—a whirlwind of bronze, a tempest! Barley, emmer, flax, wheat—no seed-head could withstand the golden glimmer of moonlight singing out from my hand.” Not only does this splash so much color on the canvas you can’t help but ricochet from detail to lovingly crafted detail in Boschian delight, but also it humanizes the puzzling to make it genuinely transportive: the taxman, easiest to lampoon, is instead “Gray-haired and sour-faced, Piseni has the final say on any village matters, which means he’s the first one the soldiers come for when taxes aren’t paid”, anxieties that lead to a rich internal train of thought about what his life could be like, what it was like for the hundreds of actual lives he condenses. We’re ripped from our frame of reference to grapple with taxes that were, yes the burden it is for us, but more than that, the key point of connection to the empire that enveloped your life, perhaps the one time a year you travelled to the capital to savor its sights and sounds, awed by connections with worlds unfathomed, the moment your work is experienced as integrated with emergent machineries of being far beyond the barley that builds it, like did you realize the Bronze Age had highly complex economies rich with the considerations we haughtily reserve for our own age, we wave away their societies like okay over thousands of years people learned to lend money to farmers and this created money, voila civilization, and it’s like I don’t think you understand, there was active finance brokered in similar sophistications, I mean like credit spreads in the Old Assyrian period could actually decrease during periods of political stress because terms would shorten to reduce risk exposure to debt amnesties associated with the start of a new reign but the agricultural season is fixed, right, so premiums would rise but because the competition for creditworthy borrowers and the lack of alternatives meant you had to transact anyway at the going rate, this meant lower risk adjusted returns for your silver since you’re forced to eat a lot of the additional risk, which is an effective reduction in silver’s purchasing power since you’re essentially buying a physical delivery commodity futures contract even if it’s structured as a loan, which means that, hey, where are you going, come back, I was about to circle this around into tax arbitrage, don’t you want to hear about tax arbitrage.

There you are, sit, now speaking of the historicity of tax arbitrage, the setting’s rich imaginings are augmented by ample historical footnotes studded into the text contextualizing this world as vivid as lived, full of the intricacies inset by our animating complexities: “Some scholars have argued that all taxes were paid in labor during this time period, but archaeological evidence from those silos shows that some farmers left large amounts of weeds in their tax grain to increase the weight.” Stop talking about taxes you’re crying into your screen, okay fine, the historicity excels beyond scholarly copypastes into a speculative tinkering that drives embedded meanings. The story takes place during a capitol shift to Tarhuntassa, which is imagined as upriver from a seaport in Ura, and lately up this route has come a Cypriot princess showing off her huge tracts of copper mines, and who, in an inspired bit of dot connection, is potentially the niece of Ramesses II, who is in fact at that moment on the verge of a great war with the Hittites, suddenly you have an entire geopolitical intrigue on the verge of a megahistorical shift that could very well exchange St. George for Tarhunt, all this seethes constantly just below the surface. There’s also, even more importantly, an Ea Nasir meme.

With such grounding, the puzzles breeze by, helped by painstaking polish that no doubt burned many a midnight candle. Indeed this game is at pains not to break, using the blessing of the wind on an object that gets whisked out of state resets the blessing to the stele for instance. It’s amazing how seamlessly so much of this works, given the enormous range of possible states and solutions. Quality of life features, like a “stash it” command that lets you put a spell into a stele then immediately return to where you are, or a clickable map with symbols that mark points of interest, lubricate any friction in the joins. Certainly, through all the backtracking and fetching, every nicety you’re given invites you to imagine more, you’re tapping your foot like why can’t there be some contrivance to connect spells stored in the separate steles so you don’t have to haul them back and forth, but the level of these complaints merely demonstrates how effortlessly we’ve risen from the base.

That said, as you whittle down the sequence of puzzles and are forced to fight with some of the wonkier ones, alas, humanity is glimpsed. The copper chimes sequence was so finicky that I couldn’t get it to work, which resulted in the chimes constantly going off to annoy both Kassu and me as I wandered the map. I looked up the walkthrough; this didn’t help; so I checked the walkthrough for another puzzle that was confusing me, the aqueduct, where apparently I need to get so heavy the aqueduct breaks, or something, it wasn’t entirely clear, so I took the curse of the earth and grabbed the chimes, well whoops the chimes got stolen in the process of exchanging curses, so grab the chimes again, well whoops the chimes still have amplification, so switch out amplification for earth, invert it to wind, used the wind to get into the aqueduct, invert it to earth, infuse it into the chimes, hold it on the right square, nothing, so fine, I went down to grab something else, the first object that came to mind was the lamp, so down to the caves, or I need visibility, so take earth out of the chimes, stash the chimes, switch earth out for invisibility, invert it to visibility, down to the caves, get lamp, back up to the stele, switch out to earth, invert it to wind, squiggle into the aqueducts, invert it to earth, imbue earth into the lamp, nothing, drop and hold just to see, nothing, you can see this gets frustrating. There’s a kind of postgame that invites further playful exploration which I wish I could be here praising, but it’s the tedium that clunks from these lesser puzzles that wanes the curiosity of even the historically minded.

All of which is to blame the limitations of time, as we all must. Obviously, The Wise-Woman’s Dog ought to be twenty times larger and taught in schools, but we must suffer waylaid by our inevitabilities, chief amongst them the need to pay taxes.