Hildy

Big, unapologetic, lovingly-made tribute to the Enchanter games? Sign me up! There was basically no chance that I would actually dislike this game, and it delivered all the things I expected: bizarrely-specific spells and potions, magical solutions to mundane problems, weird contraptions with no apparent purpose, and a climactic battle against an evil being. I'm even going to indulge my own pride a bit and interpret some aspects as Scroll Thief references even if they probably aren't (a rule against first-year students using GNUSTO, an invisible barrier that stops you from carrying books out of the room, restrictions being put on teleportation spells to stop you from telefragging yourself or others).

So before I continue on with the review, please understand that my overall impression was very positive. I had a lot of fun with this game. The flavor and writing were very much on-point for the "Zorkian" aesthetic. And the abandoned shopping mall is a classic way to throw a bunch of puzzles together; it reminded me of Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which also used that setting to great effect. I laughed out loud at the moment that uses Inform's default parser responses to comedic effect:

> The noogle spell (dress the target in an outfit perfect for his or her personality).
>
> > remove towel
> (first closing the room door)
> You take off the fluffy pink towel.
>
> > noogle me
> POOF! You are surrounded by a cloud of pink smoke. When it dissipates, you find that you are wearing the perfect outfit!
>
> > x outfit
> Which do you mean, the orange high tops, the yellow leggings, the pink shorts or the oversized T-shirt?

My main criticisms come in a couple different varieties. First, the polish issues: places where there are fun, sensible puzzles, but the implementation makes them less fun than they could be. Missing synonyms (a ROUND KNOB allows X KNOB but not X ROUND), overall lack of cluing (when seeing a gold circle, why would my first instinct be (Spoiler - click to show)PUT CIRCLE ON WALL to make a rectangle?), and sometimes just a general fiddliness that doesn't work well with the parser model (in one specific case, you have to RUN NORTH to beat a time limit when just NORTH isn't enough; anywhere else, even when under an even stricter time limit, RUN NORTH says you're in no hurry). I think another round or two of testing would have smoothed these all away, and the experience would have been better for it.

(Also in this category is "it wasn't a bug but it would have been nice" features. In the opening segment, a key NPC won't appear until you have all the equipment you need, but I didn't know what I was missing and had to wander the map randomly until I realized I hadn't examined a particular closet. A mention of what exactly I was missing would have helped. And a lot of things had limits on them that felt kind of artificial. Why does the DYSMU potion only have four doses? Is there really any difference, gameplay-wise, between "I messed up that sequence, I'll try again" and "I messed up that sequence, I'll restore and try again", except forcing the player to save often?)

Second, the map felt enormous, which sometimes served a purpose and sometimes didn't—do we really need four rooms with almost identical descriptions to express that this bridge is really long? In the main body of the game, there are tons of puzzles you can access immediately, but many of them can't be solved until you have items or spells from other areas. I think a bit more gating would have helped with this: puzzles that block off a whole section of the map until solved, instead of just giving you an item to apply elsewhere.

And third, is a problem that showed up a lot in the original Zork and Enchanter trilogies.

There come times when an author has clearly come up with a really awesome idea for a puzzle, where you need to take these specific steps to solve it. The machine room in Enchanter, the coal mine in Sorcerer, the featureless plain and treasure vault in Spellbreaker. They have a vision in their head of how the puzzle should play out, and all they have to do is guide the player along that path. This game had a few of these, most notably the strange machine in JCZorkmid.

Except, something else in the game would get in the way of that. So they add reasons you can't use that thing. The key moment of the coal mine in Sorcerer is using time travel and giving your spellbook to your alternate self.
- What if the player just drops the book to pick up later? Well, anything dropped in the coal mine is lost forever.
- What if they throw the book into the next room? There's a lake there, if you throw the spellbook it gets soaked and ruined.
- What if they memorize all the spells they need before doing this puzzle? Well you see the VILSTU potion has an odd side effect that erases all spells you've memorized when it wears off.

And so on and so on. And the problem is, it tends to become much more satisfying for the designer than the player, because the player can't solve the puzzle using their knowledge of how the world works—if they try to use their knowledge from elsewhere, diabolus ex machina stops them.

For an example from this game, there's a segment where you lose all your clothes, and can't continue until you can preserve your modesty somehow. Early on in the game, you learned a "magically create clothes" spell…but that's not the intended solution here, so the device that puts you in this segment also erases all your known spells and takes away your spell book, and you have to memorize them again afterward.

Now, restrictions like this aren't always a bad thing. The way the game keeps you from using the time travel spell in different places (the temporal rune) is brilliant and makes sense, and lets you learn the rule and then figure out how to use it. But some puzzles, like the strange machine, really didn't work for me, because it felt like it wasn't testing my ability to use the tools I was given—it was testing my ability to guess which specific solution the developer had in mind.

All in all, this game had a lot in common with BOSH. It was a big, sprawling puzzlefest with fantasy elements that didn't take itself too seriously but was also deeply, enjoyably earnest about it…and it could have crossed the line from "fun" to "amazing" if it just had a bit more polish, and maybe refactored a few of the trickier puzzles. I hope it gets that little bit more polish after the competition, and I look forward to what the implementor does next!