Hildy

What are we to make of the genre label which Hildy blithely affixes to itself, “Zorkian Fantasy”? Considered as a setting, it’s simple enough to summarize the relevant tropes: the Great Underground Empire, Enchanter-style magic, grues (all of which feature in Hildy, though you need to go out of your way to find, and be eaten by, the last). But as a genre, we need to consider the themes, and here things get confusing: which Zork? Are we talking about the colonialism, doubling, and metaphysical renunciation that Drew Cook finds in the original trilogy? The austere apocalyptics of Spellbreaker? Perhaps the playful treasure-hunting of mainframe Dungeon, or the don’t-think-too-hard-about-it minigame-frame of Zork Zero?

I confess that I’m no expert – heck, I’ve never even played a game with Zork in its title, though I did work my way through the Enchanter trilogy some years ago – but as best I can tell, Hildy’s answer is “that bit in Sorcerer with the amusement park.” There are other echoes, of course: you play a neophyte enchanter, as in Enchanter, you run around their eponymous Guild for a bit, as in the beginning of Sorcerer, and in a homage to Spellbreaker, you’ll tear your hair out at some of the puzzles (more on that later). But after a linear, more character-driven opening that sees the titular Hildy chewed out for unconventional use of magic, experiencing a crisis of confidence, and on the advice of her mentor going for a walk in the woods to clear her head, she finds her way to a Great Underground Shopping Mall chock full of 1980s puns, where the bulk of the game plays out.

To its credit, it really commits to the bit: you’ll search for spells at Waldenscrolls, see The Implementors Must Be Crazy promoted on the theater’s marquee, and get a pizza at Little Flathead’s; meanwhile, when you magic yourself up an outfit, it comes complete with yellow leggings and orange high tops. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, you’ll probably enjoy it, but I have to confess I don’t count myself in that audience, especially given the few occasions when the author shows that they’re also capable of a Wodehovian sort of humor that would fit just fine in the Zork wheelhouse:

"Field snooker is a sport with an exciting and noble history. The history of the perpetually last place Lucksuckers is neither of those things."

It’s not all fun and games, though – there’s an ancient vampire who’s taken over the mall and turned his victims into ghouls, and to escape that fate you’re going to need to solve some puzzles. For all my mixed feelings about how out of place the mall is, I have to confess it makes a solid backdrop for this kind of adventure – witness Only Possible Prom Dress. Just as in that game, the stores in Hildy provide some light theming for different pieces of several interlocking puzzle chains, with mall-wide challenges like getting the power on and navigating around places the cavern’s decay has made less accessible. There are machinery puzzles, and combat puzzles, and time travel puzzles, and of course lots of spellcasting puzzles. As in the Enchanter trilogy, much of the game is structured around a Metroidvania loop of solving puzzles to get spells (or potions) to solve more puzzles to get more spells – it’s a classic, and it works just as well here as you’d expect (though purists may balk at the way Hildry streamlines some of the traditional elements of the Enchanter system, for example by not requiring you to memorize a spell more than once to cast it multiple times, I appreciated the quality of life upgrades).

Some of these puzzles are quite enjoyable, and I got through about half of the game with only the lightest of hints – getting the lights up and running, defeating my first ghoul, exorcising a cursed mirror. And exploration is typically smooth, with generally strong implementation and the author doing a good job communicating the vibe of each store and location without larding up the descriptions with unnecessary nouns. But after that point, I started turning to the walkthrough more and more frequently. At a macro level, beyond knowing that I was trying to defeat the vampire, it wasn’t clear to me what I was trying to do other then just bumble through any puzzle-looking situation I ran across and hope eventually I’d achieve my goal. And at the tactical level, I ran into a couple of challenges that seemed to require much higher levels of authorial ESP than I possess.

I’ll spoiler-block the one that broke my trust that I’d be able to figure the later puzzles out: (Spoiler - click to show) so there’s a scroll that’s lodged in a small hollow under a giant pile of debris, which I assumed I needed to find a telekinesis spell to retrieve. But no, actually you’re meant to intuit that you should use the shrink ray next door to make yourself small enough to pick your way through the rubble and grab the scroll. Unfortunately, you can’t aim the ray at yourself, so you need to fix a vending-machine robot (that part was fine), and intuit that of the half-dozenish items on the open-ended list of what’s for sale, the only one you’re actually meant to buy is the makeup compact, since you can use its mirror to reflect the shrink ray. But even that’s not done because you won’t have enough time to get the scroll before growing big again unless you RUN, not walk, through a very specific path. In fairness, use of RUN is prompted in an earlier puzzle, but there are a lot of leaps of logic the player needs to make to even develop a theory of how they might solve this, with no real clues pointing you in the right direction.

Unfortunately this isn’t a one-off, as many of the endgame clues seem very challenging to solve through logic alone. Hildy also starts to feel like it doesn’t trust you to play with your new toolkit once you’re sufficiently tooled up: there’s a late-game sequence where you’re forced into a room with a bunch of ghouls, but you’re not given the chance to act in the scene and invoke the powerful protective magic you have at that point, or even use a disguise spell on the cyclops guarding the door, since the game has a single solution in mind and contrives the timing so that nothing else can even be attempted. As for the climactic vampire confrontation, it relies not only on purely out-of-world knowledge about the vulnerabilities of a vampire, but also incorrect out-of-world knowledge (Spoiler - click to show)(vampires don’t show up in mirrors, but that doesn’t mean looking in one is typically supposed to hurt them), as well as requiring the player to think back to the earliest moments of the game without much in the way of specific prompts. Adding insult to injury, even after defeating him you need to jump through one last underclued hoop to make it home.

In fairness, there are other elements of Hildy that I enjoyed. There’s some understated storytelling in the environment, low-key mysteries that don’t really matter but which are fun to engage with and develop theories around as you explore. The Guild material also felt promising; the characters aren’t exactly richly-drawn to rise above stereotypes, but the author’s got a good handle on a Harry-Potter-but-Zork vibe that could have easily played a bigger role. And the implementation for what must be a complex magic system struck me as very solid, despite the inherent difficulty involved. But Hildy presents itself first and foremost as a comedy puzzler, and having chosen this take on what being a piece of Zorkian Fantasy means, there’s not much support the other pieces of the design can lend when the going gets too tough and idiosyncratic.