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The Vambrace of Destiny.zip
Contains The Vambrace of Destiny/Vambrace​_230922.ulx
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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The Vambrace of Destiny

by Arthur DiBianca profile

2023

(based on 12 ratings)
4 reviews

About the Story

A light dungeon crawl. Tap spell gems to defeat monsters!


Game Details


Awards

5th Place - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(3)
4 star:
(7)
3 star:
(2)
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Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 4
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A fun dungeon adventure!, November 13, 2023
by manonamora
Related reviews: ifcomp

The Vambrace of Destiny is a dungeon crawler adventure, with limited commands and filled with puzzles. You must go through the different levels of the dungeon, fight monsters, discover treasures, and gather all the spells.

I did not reach the ending. The current review only account for what was played.

Until I reached the second level and was essentially stuck, banging my head against the wall because I could not solve the puzzles, TVoD was quite an enjoyable light parser (especially for a parser-adverse/noob like me). It has limited commands, which are essentially shortcuts; a visible map on the screen (at least in the play online version), which showed where you are and what rooms you discovered, and reasonable logical puzzles (even the one I got stuck on...), and hints (external document).

The logic of the game is relatively simple: explore the dungeon, find a monster but can't fight it, explore some more, find a spell, fight the monster with the spell, go to the next bit. As you advance further, the puzzles require extra steps to be solved, often with combinations of actions or "passing a turn". Even if some puzzles required retracing your steps to unlock further parts, they were quite enjoyable to solve!

I still spent enough time faffing about, pressing the wrong direction on the screen, or forgetting to press a certain command, or just not getting the puzzle, that the clock ran out before I could reach the end. Starting level 2, the puzzles leave the beginner level... I think I managed to visit 1/3 to 1/2 of the rooms of level 2 before I gave up.

Still, I had quite a bit of fun, and breaking through the blocks on the path, defeating the monsters, and finding the treasures, were pretty satisfying! Level 1 is a hoot!
I really appreciated the simple commands (the investigrab especially!) and how merciful the game was (you might not manage to solve a puzzle or finish the game, but you won't die).

I want to revisit this game down the line (aka when a walkthrough drop - the hints are not enough for a noob), because I really want to reach the end.

[Originally played on 1-Oct during the IFComp]

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Single-key dungeon crawler with increasingly complex powers, November 22, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).

Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.

Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.

But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.

This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A well-presented dungeon crawl, November 7, 2023
by AKheon (Finland)
Related reviews: parser-based, Inform 7, IF Comp 2023, fantasy

The Vambrace of Destiny is a parser-based IF by Arthur DiBianca, published for IFComp 2023. The game is a dungeon crawler with a very streamlined execution. The writing and world building are both fairly minimal, and the normal Inform 7 interface has also been heavily modified to only accept single-button input, which makes the gameplay feel remarkably fast-paced and smooth.

The game is technically very impressive. Once you get used to how the game works, playing it feels like a breeze. Although the limited input scheme is quite unusual, I could see it working for a number of other kind of games on Inform 7 too. There's also a map screen that becomes updated as you keep exploring the game world, which makes moment-to-moment gameplay feel even cleaner.

One drawback of all this streamlining is that it really highlights the old school, essentially fetch quest-like and quite repetitive nature of the adventure itself. There are some fairly intricate puzzles which require you to do things in a certain order, or with certain timing, to mix things up. Still, with the minimal storytelling and minimal interface, I found myself slightly demotivated to continue after a point. I think you might have to love old school dungeon crawling just for the sake of it to get the most out of this title.

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