Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider

One-room romp where you play a fairy, giving suggestions to a mysterious stranger to fix an ancient machine while two more NPCs fend off a band of goblins. You're too small to be heard or perform any actions yourself, but flying to an object will attract the stranger's attention to it, and if he's holding something suitable, will try to use it on the object. Basically, "USE x ON y" with extra steps.

It's "limited parser", so gameplay is purely typing in nouns, which leaves room to really fill out the fairy player-character's personality, and she's delightful and hilarious. The Dunning-Kruger effect writ large, confidently clueless about everything around her: "As soon as you first laid eyes on him, you knew that he was destined to fall obsessively in love with you and die of a broken heart, so once again you flutter enticingly into his gaze. But, when he swats you away like an annoying insect, you are reminded that this poor, proud man is concealing his abysmal eyesight from his companions."

Being clueless, she refers to items as "thingamajigs", "whatsits" etc, it's up to you to decipher what they are, help get the machine working again, solve the mystery of the stranger, and escape to freedom. A PRAY command provides hints, giving you "y" from "USE x on y", but could probably do with a second level that also reveals "x", to avoid occasional moments of lawnmowering.

I suppose that the title of this review could be considered as a spoiler, but since this fact of the game world was intentionally announced by author C. E. J. Pacian as part of teaser publicity in the days leading up to its release, I'm not worried about it.

Pacian's trademark creativity is on display in this short light puzzler that starts out with an eye toward comedy but slowly refocuses on drama over the course of its plot. Nothing is quite what it seems in this world, which the interactor sees in a form doubly-refracted through the twin prisms of the player character's hefty egotism and vast ignorance. Though these distortions, are, of course, deliberate obscuration of important information by the author, they're imposed in such a playful manner that the player welcomes the friction as a chance to linger longer in this highly entertaining universe.

Due to its limited parser format (accepting only nouns as commands, with an implicit >FLY TO verb), it's possible to play through the entire scenario without gaining much understanding of the game universe, but the real fun lies in trying to see through the veiled descriptions and decide what's really going on. It's this multi-level gameplay (and the story's inventively but delicately interacting plotlines) that makes Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider stand out as more than just good.

The original, produced in only five days, was terrific, and already the author has released post-competition versions to address a few minor issues that weren't very noticeable. (My own playthrough seemed 100% problem-free.) Even before these refinements, it was an excellent game to put in front of parser and/or puzzler newbies who are having trouble understanding how interactive fiction could be considered fun. For those who already know their way around, it makes a great bit of fun, sized somewhere between "snack" and "light meal" in scope -- perfect for a lunch break or a long commute.

I quite enjoyed this game. The writing is cute, and the puzzles are fun.

I have some spoilerific feedback for the author.

This game was part of Iron ChIF, and it is a good showing for a game written in a short time period. I particularly loved the setting, characters, and the voice of the narrator.

You play as a fairy attached by a string to a mysterious stranger who has a device that labels things in an unfamiliar language. You are accompanied by an elf and a human who are fighting off gobling while you, the fairy, guide the human to different objects in an attempt to reassemble ancient machinery.

Hilariously, you don't know the names of anything, so your inventory in the game can have a gizmo, a whozit, a doodad, etc.

I had trouble getting started since the game requires leaps of intuition, but without hints I was soon seeing patterns, taking notes, and having some good successes.

One thing this game does really well is reward you for right actions. I remember reading an Adam Cadre interview where he said that every piece of text the player sees should be rewarding, and that happens here. Never do you pass a milestone without getting more lore, more characterization, or a funny moment or some kind of action.

While I didn't vote in the competition, I believe both games were great. The other game did a better job, I think, with the theme, but this game did better, I think, with the core IF elements.

(I was a judge for the inaugural episode of the Iron ChIF event, and this is the evaluation I wrote for that event. As such, it is organized around the scoring categories of Iron ChIF.)

Writing

The narrative voice of the fairy is very strong, and every parser response I saw was infused with it. She (I assume, because “every other fairy you have ever met also thinks the same of herself” implies every fairy is a “she”—though perhaps they just use the generic feminine?) is an unreliable narrator in the way that matters most to IF, which is that she doesn’t understand or accurately report on her surroundings, but she’s also not a very reliable reporter of her own feelings, adding some layer of bluster to anything that might get too personal. It’s not that she wants to attract Lind’s attention, it’s that she knows fate has ordained that she do so. It’s not that being kept in a pocket with the corpses of her fellows for ages has been traumatic or even upsetting, it’s just that it’s dented her cheerful disposition slightly. Everything she says has to be scrutinized a bit for what’s really going on.

When it comes to the NPCs, the clear standout is the stranger. At first he seems sinister, and that’s not entirely inaccurate; he does eat fairies, who are sapient creatures, and torments them (however obliviously) by keeping them captive first. But ultimately he’s looking for love, and he’s willing to risk being devoured for it, and this wins the fairy’s sympathies in the end. Trala and Lind, meanwhile, are more stock characters who never get very much depth, but this works fine for the arc of the fairy’s imagined alignment with them (when they have not even noticed her) vs. her actual alignment with the stranger (whom she actually speaks to in her own voice at the end, a rare occurrence).

The setting has often been one of the major pleasures of Pacian’s game, and in this one-room game we get a lot less of that, but I appreciate the flavoring of the D&D-style high fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi. It’s familiar enough to be gestured to quickly instead of spelled out in more depth, with enough zest to keep it from seeming like something you’ve seen a million times before.

Playability

The game plays very smoothly for the most part—it’s hard to get hung up for too long, mostly thanks to its one-verb conceit, which makes the puzzles come down to figuring out what things are based on what details you can get from the fairy’s descriptions and the noises of the mysterious device. Once you’ve twigged to what’s what, there’s no additional step to figure out how to execute what you need to do. Nothing is too complex, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

I did find that as the game went on and the number of doohickeys, whatsits, and thingummies mounted, it became difficult to keep track of what was what, and I wished that the game had been designed to take already-used items out of play, or had some other mechanic to limit the amount of time a player can spend combing through the stranger’s pocket examining everything to try to remember which name goes with what characteristics.

The other part of the game I struggled with a bit was the final sequence on the platform, where I had to figure out the means of searching the treasure pile for a specific thing. This takes on a sort of (Spoiler - click to show)telescoping Lime Ergot mechanic that hasn’t appeared before; it works well, but did take me a few frustrated moments to even think to attempt. It’s hard to get out of the groove, right at the end, of a game whose puzzles have otherwise all worked one way. So if more varied mechanics are going to be present, probably best to introduce them earlier. But it didn’t hold me up for too terribly long.

There is an in-game hint system, which I perhaps should have tried for the sake of the evaluation, but I didn’t end up needing it in general–which is a compliment to the puzzle design, at least!

Design

The game’s puzzle design mostly feels solid and unified, other than the last-minute introduction of a different puzzle type. Outside of that part, the puzzles refined on the same single concept and flowed nicely one into the next.

There’s thematic resonance, as well, between the gameplay of attempting to decipher the surroundings by piecing together information from two people (beings?) with an incomplete understanding of them and the thread of loneliness and frustrated communication attempts that runs through the game.

The game also has a tendency to set up and then immediately puncture well-worn tropes, such as the monstrous enemy being revealed to be a corrupted form of humans or a humanlike species, or the good old “lost technology of the ancients” (they don’t make machines like this anymore… because they make them much smaller now). This is always a solid source of humor and keeps things fun for jaded types like me who have perhaps consumed too much genre fiction for their own good. (Of course, frequently-used tropes can still be done well; it’s all in the execution. But when you have little space for that execution, sometimes a quick humorous nod is the right choice.)

Showing off the unique affordances of Dialog was not perhaps so much a focus here; I do understand that it makes a one-verb game easier to put together in this short time and saves a lot of effort getting rid of default responses, but I do feel like “it makes it easier to limit its capabilities” maybe leaves less of an impression than showing off what it can do.

Inventiveness

Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider definitely felt fresh and unusual to me in a lot of ways. I can’t quite think of a good comparison point for its figuring-out-what-things-are-based gameplay (Where Nothing Is Ever Named, maybe? But it’s certainly not a crowded field). I also can’t say I’ve encountered many interdimensional spiders in trenchcoats pretending to be human in IF or elsewhere.

The PC did feel very Tinkerbell-esque, as Pacian tacitly acknowledged, but to get that kind of character as a protagonist is somewhat unusual. (I personally can’t name any other works from the point of view of a Tinkerbell expy, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it’s something.)

The setting is perhaps the least original aspect, spiders and passing trope-subversions aside, but it’s a one-room game, which makes setting harder to convey, so it’s more that it would have been impressive if it did manage to evoke a unique setting than that it’s disappointing that it didn’t.

Challenge Ingredient

The device held by the stranger—which seems to tell him things about his environment, albeit in a way not quite so straightforward as saying the names of objects it’s pointed at—is central to (most of) the gameplay, providing information to supplement the fairy’s limited perception of her surroundings. The nonhumanness of the language may not necessarily matter, but the nonhumanness of the spider matters (to his motivations, to our interpretation of his character), so I’d say that aspect of the ingredient is not neglected.

The ingredient is, however, just that little bit shy of being fundamental to the dish. You could have had almost the same game if the spider were just chittering to himself when he looked at different objects. But it’s still an excellent use of the ingredient.