The Wise-Woman's Dog

In this hybrid parser/choice game, you play as a dog in the Hittite Empire (ca. 2000 BCE) whose owner, the village wise-woman, is under a mysterious curse. You cannot, yourself, cast spells, but you can absorb them and transfer them to other objects, and you must use this ability to save your human companion. Mostly, as it turns out, by stealing everything that is not nailed down and selling it so that you can buy magical trinkets that will let you do more things with your spell repertoire. (It’s lucky the black-market dealer assumes you’re doing business on behalf of your owner—well, you are, sort of—and doesn’t seem fazed by this!)

You can only carry one item and one spell at a time, which gets a bit fiddly, but ITEMS and SPELLS commands that let you automatically retrieve things from wherever you left them are a big help. I also appreciated the THINK command telling you what currently-unsolved puzzles you currently have the ability to solve; the map is big, and it can be easy to lose track of things you encountered when you didn’t have the ability to deal with them yet.

The spell-based puzzle gameplay is satisfying, and the eventually-acquired ability to spells is a nice twist on it (unlocking something that lets you modify spells has been a feature of this author’s work before, but I think this particular iteration is new?). The canine PC is also fun, and their concern for their human is quite sympathetic.

But the greatest joy here is the setting—an unusual historical milieu that has been extensively researched and brought to life with vibrantly described locations and a host of lively NPCs, including a shady copper merchant, a world-weary black-market dealer (who is not too happy about fencing stuff from the temple for you, but she’ll graciously do it anyway), assorted townsfolk worrying about their taxes (which you can help them with), and many more.

There are also extensive footnotes explaining the historical basis of many of the things in the game (house layouts, clothing, food), and giving additional context on the political and religious background. You can probably enjoy the game perfectly well without reading any of the footnotes, but I love learning random facts, especially about history, so for me their existence was a huge plus.

In short, the game was fun, well-designed, highly polished, and even educational, and I really enjoyed it!