Mr Seguin's Goat

Mr Seguin's Goat (MSG) seems a bit miscast for TALP, but it does seem to be a worthy effort, if more than a bit opaque. It's an adaptation of Daudet's short story, which you can find on gutenberg.org about a goat who wants freedom, and she has warned that it will be the death of her, but she goes anyway. She meets a male goat, and then she meets her fate in the form of a wolf who kills her. Cheery stuff!

MSG is largely faithful to the story, with of course the obligatory ways for the player to mess up and a few tricky roadblocks and frustrations to endure. It's cruel on the Zarfian scale, largely due to a deck of cards you must find. Here the game seems to tease you by making card 2 easy to find, and later you find cards 3 and 4. The problem? It's divided into four chapters, and you can't go back. You may suspect there is a card 1, but it's not obvious.

Perhaps there is something like the learned helplessness experiment with the rats and the shocks here. If it's intentional, it's a sly trick to pull on TALP. The start is relatively charming. You are a goat on a farm, and you need to eat three things before your owner milks you. You are tethered to a post, so you can only go two rooms away. The coding here must be rather clever, as you could go north/west/south/east from the start, but not with the post. It also underscores the security you feel, which is a trade-off for the freedom you think you really want. Something important to the best ending, so to speak, is outside of your initial range.

One character in the first part tips you off to the existence of the other, who is kind of tough to find due to the verbs. The game has a list of verbs, and while you can brute-force your way through them, it gets tiring. I wound up finding the card and not guessing the verb because (Spoiler - click to show)it was bloody, and I figured the blood had dried. The descriptions aren't especially lush, since the game is in Quill format and fits into a Z3 file.

Indeed, I felt I was missing something, but a bit of impatience kicked in. And while Mr. Seguin asked "are you sure you've done everything here?" I was in the mood to push forward. Especially since there was a fence where you need to JUMP FENCE instead of JUMP, even after you've jumped and it could be implicit.

This all seems a bit more like "here's how a parser can be a bit sly and so you have to use your head if things don't work" than a genuine tutorial. The author probably had to save space for the Z3 game. But it felt almost like an anti-tutorial, and a list of possible verbs really didn't change stuff.

So that's the bad stuff, and I think it's important to be warned about that before going on to what works rather better, which is the assortment of animals that you as Blanchette, the goat, talk to. Some don't react much, some just chat, and some show the same fatalistic fear that the reader may be feeling. Some warn you against doing further, and some are willing to help you on your way to the top of the mountain to meet the wolf. You're pretty sure you can win!

The story reads like a conglomeration of fables, but it works, overall, to me, once you see what to do with the puzzles. You find a secret passage. You realize an upturned cart needs to be moved. You find a use for dung.

The game foreshadows a bad end throughout, as when your owner locks you in the barn to stop you from fleeing, but then you get out anyway. A few of the puzzles involve killing a weaker animal than yourself, or leading them to their doom. Some seem resigned to it. It's not especially cheery in retrospect. There's a bit of odd causality with some dancing faeries that disappear once you solve a puzzle elsewhere. A sign somehow counts as wood and bread. The climax at the end is a fight with the wolf. I can't spoil it too much, but it is a sort of card game, and it relies on you picking up the cards that you found.

I wound up getting only 60 out of 100 points, and a lot of people were baffled as to whether there were 40 others, or maybe this was just another trick the author played on us to say, well, you can't even get close to what you want.

As mentioned above, Mr. Seguin's Goat felt like it would have fit in better with ParserComp or a TinyInform jam. It doesn't really have a tutorial behind a list of verbs that you can crank through and eventually get the right one, and there's even a sign that you READ to see that you are veru obedient! I'll take it as snark pointed at the goat and not the player. That, and how I figured the one missing card was destroyed when I found it, and taking a while to figure how to put something in the cart, slowed things down a lot for me. Perhaps I should have tried some of the solutions, in the general "there must be a solution here" vein. It would have worked. But I think it would run contrary to the spirit of TALP, which is about intuiting the right answer or at least telling the player what to do.

Still, I'm glad to see a retelling of an unusual story. There is macabre imagination here, and it's an accomplishment to figure what you did and look back through the journey. It's fatalistic without a "ha ha you had no chance." But boy, it's the feistiest TALP game I've played by a long shot.