The Wise-Woman's Dog

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.