A Quest In Time

Towards the western end of the Forum Romanum, the ancient heart of the Eternal City, tucked below the still-majestic ruins of temples, arches, and courthouses, lies the Lacus Curtius. It’s incredibly unassuming today – a random assortment of paving stones scattered around some divot-filled turf – but it wouldn’t have been much more imposing at the height of the Republic either; for the Lacus Curtius wasn’t a great edifice, but rather a sort of basin or wet pit, one of the last remaining bits of fen when the swamplands below the Capitoline Hill was drained. What makes it special? Even the Romans themselves weren’t quite sure. One story is that the spot was made sacred after it had been hit by lightning. Another, more involved, says that a great sinkhole once appeared at the site, threatening to swallow some of the most important buildings in the city, when an oracle said that the rift could be closed only if Rome’s greatest strength were sacrificed to it; a brave young soldier decided this must mean the bravery of a soldier (perhaps unsurprisingly) and jumped into the abyss, saving the day.

The last story is that some guy named Curtius got his horse stuck in the mud there one time.
There’s nothing especially special about the Lacus Curtius, all of this is to say, except for the fact that some people who lived a very long time ago thought it was special too. So in some ways, A Quest in Time, which is a game made almost entirely out of Lacus Curtiuses (I know that’s bad Latin, Daniel, sorry!), should be right up my alley (you will be unsurprised to learn that when I visited Rome on my honeymoon, I befuddled my wife by making a beeline for the aforementioned sump). This time-traveling adventure takes you to Rome in the last decades of the Republic, but also Athens as it catches its breath between flare-ups of the Peloponnesian War, London during the Plague Year, and more eras besides. But you’ll find no lovingly-described Acropolis or a version of the pre-Great Fire St. Paul’s conjured up with historical fidelity; there are temples and churches and marketplaces and all that, but the spaces are general rather than specific, workaday spaces that provide a bit of color to the puzzles, most of which involve decoding ciphers left behind for you by a rogue time-agent in order to figure out the spatio-temporal coordinates for your next destination.

Rather than offering a view of regular life in the past, a sort of quotidian temporal tourism, though, the effect is often just vague. Here’s a lawyer’s office in Restoration England, for example:

"The room is arranged with a careful sense of order, its atmosphere one of a quiet formality. Everything appears to be kept in its proper place, just as if governed by rules not immediately visible. There’s a stillness here that suggests deliberation rather than neglect, and you get the impression that matters of consequence are conducted within these walls."

A certain degree of vibes-focused description can be a virtue in parser games, inasmuch as it conveys mood without creating a whole bunch of distracting scenery that takes a long time to implement and risks sending the player down blind alleys. And there are other locations that have a bit more concrete detail to them. But it’s not just the location descriptions, a similar sort of fogginess infects NPCs and their dialogue, and actually interactable objects and scenery. Too many parts of the game, especially in the latter half, fall prey to fuzziness, which dramatically undercuts the fun of hopping through history.

But back to the puzzles, which are the main focus of the game – though there is a reasonably robustly-written opening, it pretty much just boils down to “you’re a rookie time agent, someone’s gone missing and could be playing out their own agenda, so it’s up to you to track him down.” They’re a pretty classic lot, with a fair number of swap-item-X-to-NPC-Y-to-get-item-Z chains there mostly for pacing, and the aforementioned encoded-coordinates puzzles being the set-pieces. I found those to be a mixed bag; several work well enough, providing just enough resistance before you can figure out how to turn a bit of ASCII art or a scrawled message that appears to be about something entirely different into a six-digit number. But I had to go to the walkthrough to solve the first of them, and even seeing the steps required to solve it I still don’t understand what was going on. The sometimes-finicky parser also made a couple puzzles harder than they were probably intended to be – there are a lot of clues written in dead languages, which is fun, but the availability of the TRANSLATE verb really should have been better signposted, and getting the time machine to work took me way too long, largely because the keypad can’t be TYPEd on, nor can its buttons be PUSHED – only PRESSED.

While the environmental storytelling gets weaker as the game progresses, however, the puzzles get easier, and the throwaway plot from the intro starts to come back into play, leading to a late-game twist that recalls a major work in the IF canon for its climax. It’s a bold move, though not one I’m wholly convinced by (Spoiler - click to show)y (inviting comparisons with Trinity is probably a fool’s errand in general, and the specific method of sabotage contemplated here – stopping the Trinity test by blowing up a particular piece of equipment with a hand grenade – doesn’t seem like it would actually accomplish much, though in fairness there are indications that there’s some other timey-wimey stuff in play and it’s that, rather than the secrets of nuclear fission, that you’re trying to keep bottled up). There’s fun to be had with A Quest in Time, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help wishing it had committed to being the clearest, most compelling version of itself, rather than the decidedly thinner and more spread-out iteration we got.