The Master of the Land

I went into this game intrigued by the blurb’s statement that several totally different playthroughs are all possible, and the game definitely lived up to that premise!

It truly feels open-ended. It takes place at a festival and captures that atmosphere, at any given moment there are so many different people to talk to and things happening in different places. You will always miss things. The protagonist Irene can choose to pursue her own goal of getting a permit to wear trousers in the forest (which I did eventually manage), or go off and investigate the many mysterious happenings: the invisible crying man and the poet, the strange Burber, a political conspiracy, all of which intersect in various ways. It can be confusing in the beginning since you don't have context for the things and people you, but over time one can follow each thread and begin figure out how it's all connected.

After completing seven or eight playthroughs over a week, I think I have a good idea of what’s going on? But there are still many things that I have not seen. I think that is longer than most players, but I kept having new ideas for things I wanted to see and try, each playthrough answering some questions and bringing up new ones. I wrote up my notes on the story and timeline of events on the forum here (spoilers galore).

The UI is great. The background changes, and the text is at a very readable size and leading. The updating reminders of current objectives are very useful, as are the prompts to auto-navigate to quest locations, which cuts down on constantly opening the map or missing things from poor navigation. Some of the images look out of place and a bit amateurish, however, as there isn’t a consistent style among the different graphics. But that is a small quibble.

I think the storyline I’m most intrigued by is (Spoiler - click to show)the aunt, currently pretending to be a Burber. She knows so much seemingly about the political assassination plot against her brother and is fighting with one of the conspirators — what is she trying to accomplish here? And her illness, brought on by dreams that come true, surely connects to the crying man come alive from the poem, but how? Gloria, too; the game starts with a warning about her and I still have no idea what her deal is.

I will definitely come back to this at some points, try to find out more about my unanswed questions

Truly feels like being at a festival - the overheard gossip, the dancing with strangers, the drama and fights you might witness, and the social anxiety that bubbles through once the conversation goes silent - with the added tension of hints of "something big" brewing in the background.

As you explore the map and make your choices, the festival progresses. The people you talk to do not stay in one place, and you may miss some events that occur elsewhere on the estate. Rarely do you get a repeated entry when re-entering an area. No click is ever boring, even when you're not even trying to solve the mystery, because there is always someone to talk to, something to witness - and if there is nothing big happening where you are, then it is happening somewhere else.

The Master of the Land is a long, choice-based game set in a small, imaginary European country on the Mediterranean Coast in 1834. You play as Lady Irene, the daughter of a prominent nobleman and politician, although your penchant for spending time in forests studying plants is considered decidedly unladylike for this time and place. The events of the game unfold over the course of several hours at a party and festival at the Palace.

The presentation is top-notch, with attractive images accompanying the text for most choices, as well as a sidebar containing a list of the rooms you can access from the one you're currently in. There's also a map of the palace where the game takes place, as well as a link to "reminders" for what your goals are so far and information you've uncovered.

Gameplay entails selecting from a list of options in the room you're in or moving to an adjacent room. Each selection gives you (usually) a few paragraphs of text. There are lots of scheduled events at the party; you can choose to attend some, all, or none of those. You can pursue another goal related to your botanical interests. Alternatively, there are several additional storylines that you can uncover by being in the right place and the right time and making the right choices. And many events are on timers: For example, dinner is at ten, and if you're not in the dining room on time, the doors close, and you have to find some other way to spend the next half-hour or so.

All of this means that there is a lot going on. If you're a completist (and I have some of those tendencies), you should be warned that there is no way you can do everything in this game in one (or probably even a few) playthroughs. There are just too many intertwined events on timers. In fact, if you pause for just one enticing choice in a room as you're trying to get to another room for a particular event or catch up with a certain person you may miss that event or person entirely. This happened in both of my playthroughs, in fact.

(Spoiler - click to show)On the first one, the young poet Octavio told me to listen for the crying man in the dining room. I paused for just one moment on my way to the dining room to ask the servants about the whereabouts of some other men I was trying to find, and I reached the outside of the dining room just as the doors were being closed!

On the second playthrough, I was trying to identify the woman in the mask with all the keys. I finally figured out who she was, and I saw her entering a certain room. I paused for just one choice to pursue another goal (I forget which one), and when I followed the woman into the room, she was gone! I never did find her again.

It all combines to create a rich, varied experience.

A lot of times when I play choice-based games it's clear the author has designed the game to anticipate every possible set of choices I could make and has written text to account for that. Or, at most, the author tracks a few stats to affect gameplay. But, for the most part, playing a choice-based game has me feeling like my choices are still within a small set of outcomes the author has already planned out for the game. You just don't get the feeling of sheer open-endedness in terms of the events of the story that a good parser game can give. This is not to say that parser games aren't constrained in their own ways, or that choice-based games can't achieve other important artistic goals besides providing an open-ended experience. But The Master of the Land, with its location-based events, time-based events, and various goals to pursue, feels more open-ended than any choice-based game I can remember playing right now. And, since it's a choice-based game, it doesn't suffer from the problems open-ended parser-based games usually have: guess-the-verb issues, many of your actions resulting in default or error messages, or wandering around all over the map with nothing interesting happening.

It must have been an incredible undertaking to code this game and get all the potential plot events coordinated.

All in all, I really enjoyed The Master of the Land.

Twine games often fall into two traps: branching too much (so that playthroughs are short and miss almost all content) or branching too little (so that players feel frustrated, as if their choices don't matter). Games with strong writing can make up for this (like Myriad or Polish the Glass), but it's definitely a big problem for this system.

Pseudavid sidesteps this problem neatly by using a unique form of interaction. The player is put into a physical space and allowed to navigate while multiple storylines unfold simultaneously.

The game, then, becomes about being in the right place at the right time. It gives you a real sense of a bigger world, of life and vitality.

I suggest playing this game multiple times to see the different storylines.

The one thing that I had trouble with was, even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do and had some ideas about how to do it, I had trouble carrying it out.

(Note: I helped beta test this game.)