Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value

The parodic sendup of CRPG tropes is such a hoary old subgenre that I think I’ve already written two or three different intros discussing the microgenre in previous reviews just over the last couple years. Rather than attempting to rehash them – or, heavens forfend, actually tracking them down, reading what I’d previously written, and trying to synthesize them or even speak a new word – let’s just take as read that I find CRPGs lots of fun but yes, of course, they’re sufficiently ridiculous that without more satire can feel just like shooting fish in a barrel. Merely pointing out that RPG protagonists will go off to challenge immortal evil wizard-kings with only the flimsiest of provocations might provoke faint amusement, but not anything more than that sitting here 50 years on from the creation of DnD.

QftToMSV is certainly the kind of game that you think of when you think of this kind of game – the jumping off point is that you, the proprietor of a tea room, seem to have misplaced a teacup you had before you started your business and therefore feel a slight bit of attachment to, and as a result you’re willing to ransack your neighbors’ houses, stare down an incarnation of supernatural evil, and scale a mysterious, forbidding tower as you try to reclaim it – but happily the level of execution is high. For one thing, it’s quite streamlined so that you don’t need to put in a lot of busywork to get to the next joke; it’s implemented in RPG Maker, but navigation is taken care of for you, and combat is generally a quickly-finished indication that something’s gone wrong, so it winds up running almost as quick as a pure choice-based game. It also doesn’t play coy about how to reach the “best” ending; at almost every decision node, you’re offered a choice of doing things the easy, common-sense way, or escalating them absurdly, and off course taking the off-ramps leads to a “bad end” while steering into the skid keeps the shaggy dog story going (the author also helpfully autosaves the game quite frequently, so there’s little risk to exploring losing paths).

But this sort of thing lives or dies by the quality of its gags, and happily they’re quite good. “Ha ha, look a the CRPG protagonist rummaging around their neighbors’ possessions” is a dull commonplace, but following it up by having the rummagee respond to your assertion that it’s totally OK to steal everything that isn’t nailed down with "I was a juror in a court case a few years back, and that was very much not the view the judge took” was unexpected enough to provoke a laugh. Similarly, “the evil overlord calls you mean for assuming he’s bad just because he looks and acts just like an evil overlord” is a one-note joke, but the game hits it hard and repeatedly, so it reaches Sideshow-Bob-stepping-on-a-rake-fifteen-times levels of funniness. And the sly use of endings encourages messing around; the first BAD END is self-evidently a totally fine outcome, and what’s even funnier, (Spoiler - click to show) I’m pretty sure it’s only like 5% different from the hard-won GOOD END.

Is all this enough to make QftToMSV anything other than an ephemeral amusement? I don’t think so; it’s a well-executed example of its genre, but it never manages to transcend said genre’s limitations (not that I get the sense it was trying to). It’s worth a play to enjoy the well-paced jokes, but I guarantee you absolutely will look at CRPG sidequests in exactly the same way ever again.

This is a game made using, I think, RPG maker, not the first IFComp game with that engine (the same author made Quest for the Sword of Justice).

The idea is that your teacup has been stolen and you want to retrieve it. You can opt not too, getting a bad ending. In fact, there are a lot of bad endings!

Most text games don't have the features found in this game, so when I rate it in ifcomp and on ifdb I'll focus on the features it has in common with text games, which I'll describe next. Then I'll describe the features not common to text games.

The writing is witty, some of the funniest to me in the whole competition. The lampshading of the silliness of the quest, the banter, is just great to me. The characters and settings constantly escalate (I like the 'Swamp of Instant Death' or whatever it's name was). There are enough options to feel like I had at least some freedom, some opportunity to express my personality.

For the non-IF parts:

The ultra-HD tileset used looked weird to me. It was kind of in the uncanny valley.

Having to wait for the character to move between each interaction drove me nuts. I blanked out and five minutes later I had been scrolling through Twitter, and tried to remember what I was doing, and realized I had clicked out of this game a while ago to wait for the animation to finish, and came back to it. I steeled myself to continue, but after accidentally picking the wrong option in Satan's house due to relentlessly hitting the 'skip' button (which for some reason is the same as the 'choose option' button), and running into two long combats in the forest in a row, I quit, since I had already seen 2 or 3 endings. I am completely uninterested in games incorporating long animations between text like this. I don't think that would make the author feel bad, as Damon Wakes is brilliant and has done a lot of different media, often to provoke specific responses from readers or judges, so I think getting a strong reaction to the game's techniques would be a positive thing.

Very funny text though. I would definitely read the rest of the game if I didn't have to watch any more animations.

In this game, the protagonist finds her favorite teacup missing, and embarks upon a quest to retrieve it—a quest that will take her into a spooky forest, a poison swamp, a wizard’s tower, and maybe even the depths of hell. The game was created in RPGMaker to achieve the correct aesthetic (which it does in charming and attractive fashion), but functions as a gauntlet in which one choice will progress the main plot and the other(s) will lead to a bad end.

This is all in service of a parody of RPG tropes, which is not exactly untrodden ground. Observations about RPG characters breaking into people’s houses and taking their stuff have been made before. Commentary on the lengths to which a PC will go, risking life and limb, for relatively inconsequential sidequests is not new either (and in fact this isn’t a million miles away from the same author’s Elftor and the Quest of the Screaming King, although the main focus there was more on the also-much-mocked convention of messing around with sidequests while the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance and you’re supposed to be saving it).

The wizard tower was my favorite bit: (Spoiler - click to show)he has a fake teleport pad at the base of his tower that actually vaporizes intruders hoping for an easy way up, and when you prove your worth by taking the stairs, he offers you a perfect magical teacup that will never chip or allow its contents to go cold. (You can accept, but this is a Bad End because you didn’t get your teacup.) This is still in the territory of “RPG protagonists are thieving murderhobos and also have bizarre priorities,” but the wizard’s involvement (less as a straight-man comedic partner than a different kind of weirdo) adds an entertaining extra layer. The two of them are both baffled to minorly horrified at aspects of each other’s behavior, and they simultaneously are correct and really don’t have room to criticize.

I’m also a sucker for a “we’re going to make you deal with this legendarily annoying game mechanic—haha just kidding” gag, so I enjoyed the poison swamp ((Spoiler - click to show)it just insta-kills you, and the PC has an “I don’t know what I expected” moment).

If RPG parodies are the kind of thing you can’t get enough of, Quest for the Teacup is a well-executed entry in the genre and you’ll probably have a great time. In its best moments, it entertained me too—and it’s a half-hour game with a concentration of good moments that’s fairly high, so I would say I enjoyed it more than I didn’t. But I did always have that nagging sense of deja vu.