The Gnomish Treasury

This game is the first parser game by Lamp Post Projects, whose other works that I played have been watercolor-illustrated fantasy choice-based games, often with mystery elements.

This game is in the same setting, I believe. You play as a gnome working at a museum for a kingdom that recently received a crate of artifacts from a neighboring kingdom who had stolen some of your works. The artifacts are broken and/or disassembled.

Your job is to take a list of artifacts, find the pieces corresponding to them, assemble them, label them, and display them. The puzzles are not overly difficult and generally very on-the-nose, but there were a couple of nice twists and the overall interaction mechanism used the core parser game cycle of X-TAKE-DROP/USE very well.

The game is well-implemented, and I rarely if ever had to fight the parser.

Story-wise, the lore felt consistent and relevant to the game and was parceled out in manageable chunks. The kingdoms and characters felt realistic, and I could identify with the protagonist through suspension of disbelief.

First things first: Gnomes and Orcs being closely allied, sharing cultural artifacts and inviting each others ambassadors to their museums? Absolutely inspired choice, 10/10, gno gnotes.

I want to love this game so badly, and don't get me wrong, it's fun! But I can't praise it without caveats. A deduction game where you play as a museum curator in a fantasy setting is exactly my kind of thing, and this one does hit the mark in more ways than it doesn't. As Gnat Gnimblebrush, you're tasked with repairing, identifying, and tastefully arranging a variety of artifacts in a museum, using the magical powers of...your eyeballs. That's another little detail I love; I think fantastical worlds where you play as a regular guy are inherently funny.

Befitting a TALP entry, the parser is quite generous (I did have to snap myself with a rubber band every time I wrote "place" instead of "put") and the puzzles generally easy. I would have appreciated the difficulty ramping just a bit higher, but I also understand that could easily scare off some absolute beginners to the genre. I want to give special attention to the lore, though: plenty of fantasy titles have well-developed worlds with buckets of history, which I rarely end up caring about. The Gnomish Treasury, however, makes its history relevant to you, the player, and thus feels far more impactful. It's one thing to be told a great battle happened at some point in the past, but it's another entirely when the details of that battle are relevant to the puzzle you're solving right gnow.

Gnow for the part of the review that feels like I'm breaking a gift horse's legs. I mentioned the difficulty level in the last paragraph, and yes, it's probably as easy as it is so gnewcomers to IF don't get frustrated and quit, but perhaps that's been a tad overtuned? For later artifacts (Spoiler - click to show)you have to identify them by their presence in various portraits and tapestries throughout the museum, rather than via a list in your inventory. This is very cool, but it left me expecting there to be some "final super special bonus point challenge" or something, maybe an item that revealed an unexpected or deliberately concealed fact about the world. Then again, it feels churlish to criticize the Gnomish Treasury for not revealing itself to secretly be a political conspiracy thriller at the last minute.

Unfortunately, I did encounter a game-breaking bug: (Spoiler - click to show)mislabeling the Copper Helm as the Armor Set (a mistake I can't imagine I was the only one to make) locks the incorrect label in place, thus preventing a perfect ending. I ended up wandering around with an unlabeled set of gnondescript armor for the last part of my first attempt, trying in vain to tie it to any potentially relevant painting. In fact, that's probably where my expectation of a final revelation originated; see, I'm gnot an implacable whiner, it's the game's fault!

As it currently exists, the Gnomish Treasury is a gneat little puzzle box, ideal for gnewcomers to the parser format but still fun enough to engage veterans. I just can't shake the impression that it could have been better. I think a sequel or spiritual successor with a meatier challenge and more mechanics to play with could easily be one of my all-time favorites, so I'll be keeping an eye on Lamp Post Projects.