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Review
Exciting news, folks – it’s time for our third and final (at least for now) installment of:
Wait, Did I Beta Test This?
Yes! Just a month or two ago, so I actually remember doing so fairly well! God is in his Heaven and all is right in the world, nice work chaps, we’re all done here.
…
Oh right, the review. Knew I was forgetting something!
The Most Valuable Card in the World is a big comedy parser-puzzle adventure that’s at once highly traditional – like, read that description again and tell me if it reminds you of one or two other games you’ve played – and novel, incorporating some unique mechanics and centering on series of swaps that sees you upgrade, step by step, from what’s basically the worst Pokemon card imaginable to the eponymous treasure. It’s cavalier about killing off the player, especially in the opening, which can occasionally threatens to feel annoying – except those death messages are written with such good humor, the ways to avoid them are eminently logical, and a quick UNDO will get you back on the right track in a jiffy. There are some tricky puzzles – you’re going to need to push items from one location to another, and a simple X OBJECT won’t always tell you everything you need to know – but the clueing is very well tuned (and the hints are clear and always available), making them satisfying to solve.
For all the above seeming-contradictions, I was able to get a handle on Most Valuable Card in the World rather quickly. The chain of trades provides a clear, compelling structure to proceedings, and actually helps orient you towards what puzzles in the medium-sized map you should be solving next by providing a rough dollar value for each card you find – typically you need to be moving up step by step rather than leapfrogging. The authorial voice is also consistent and confident, managing to cram something funny into basically every sentence without seeming like it’s giving off flopsweat. Like, here’s a quotidian description of pushing a shopping cart around:
"Screeeee! Screeee! One of the wheels on this cart is so non-functional that it might as well be a cube of rock. You power through at the expense of the already damaged floor."
That made me smile, and it’s just the baseline of enjoyment that the big-swing jokes and set pieces push still further. Some of the more traditional puzzles are lampshaded, the supporting cast are an endearing set of weirdos, and the descriptions of what happens once you actually start throwing down in the ersatz Pokemon game are lots of fun. Most Valuable Card in the World isn’t my favorite story about a wildly-improbable sequence of escalating barter – the laurel goes to Gamma World RPG session I played in where I was able to parley an irradiated can of baked beans into part-ownership of the bombed-out remains of Powell’s bookstore – but it’s a heck of a close second, a real gem from this partnership between an enthusiastic neophyte author and one of the most seasoned implementers in the business.
