The Antediluvian Weapon

I always look forward to Daniel Stelzer's games now because they've basically become like Ryan Veeder, in that both have a good track record of consistently putting out well-polished games with interesting mechanics that are easy to finish and have a wide variety of settings.

The setup in this game is a kind of medieval alchemical heist, which made me realize several of the games in this competition have similar themes, which made me look up and discover the theme is 'archaeology'. The mechanic in the game is an object that vanishes things (discovering what that exactly means is the major crux of the game).

The map is compact, with most of it forming a 3x3 square. Elementals guard the different parts of the map, requiring some ingenuity in how to deal with them.

Overall I found the game solid and good for beginners while still being fun for experienced players (one optional puzzle was too hard for me as I hadn't experimented enough, but it was, fortunately, optional). To me the only flaw (if it can be called that) was that in my subjective opinion it stopped just short of greatness in story and mechanics. I feel like if it had just one more puzzle in the main areas and one more paragraph at the end with some kind of new interesting info or twist or hook then it would have been awesome. Even without that je ne sais quoi, it's one of the best games I've played this year.

Disclosure: I am biased in this game’s favor because I managed to finish it on my own (though, fuller disclosure, without the good ending). It sure does feel nice to not resort to a walkthrough!

Surely it helped that this game was part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, so it’s extra approachable—not that that means it’s easy in the puzzle department, just that it felt very smooth. The map and puzzle flow are both fairly small, which also keeps things manageable. Including a tutorial is a big part of TALJ, and this one was fantastic: clear, concise, and easily distinguished from the gameplay (since it used a different font). But beyond all that, the puzzles themselves were obviously crafted with care. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)at the point where you can go north to find a gnome or south to find an undine, the game gently urges you to walk past both of them in turn and experience failure; after you’ve observed their behavior and figured out how to sidestep each of them, things get more complicated, but now you have what you need to work out a successful course of action. All along the way, the puzzle design is very effective at leading the player to the solution without pointing right at it, creating a satisfying moment of insight.

Also, zapping things out of existence momentarily was just plain fun as a central mechanic. I enjoyed messing around with the weapon, and the part at the end where (Spoiler - click to show)you have to zap yourself to avoid an explosion was a great culmination of the premise. I wish I hadn’t already played around enough to try it earlier in the game, because it would’ve been an A+ aha moment.

I also appreciated the narrative choices in this game. We’re thrown into the middle of a story, playing only a small role in what seems to be a larger fantasy political drama. There’s no need for a detailed backstory in the intro. We have our role to play, and it feels like the right size for the task ahead. But that’s not all we get: throughout the game are places and objects that provide environmental storytelling, frescos expanding the world, and moments where the game offers us glimpses of a point of view (one small example: “[>x straw] It gestures at comfort without providing any. Which is worse than just having nothing at all”). Just like the puzzle design, the subtle storytelling stands back and lets players work things out for themselves.

Overall it’s a harmonious effect, with only a couple moments when things felt noticeably calculated. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)when my mapping sylph started narrating pertinent information about the undine’s actions in a different room, I was surprised that it had that power, and I wondered if it was added to reduce confusion for the player. I think it felt especially conspicuous because the power only came up once. But among all the careful design, I’m not about to ask the game to be messier, so this is truly an observation more than a complaint.

The other thing I wasn’t expecting was (Spoiler - click to show)the logic when it came to disappearing things inside other things. I couldn’t imagine how to save Manzio because it didn’t feel intuitive to me that the bag’s contents would stay inside it while invisible. It’s entirely possible this is set up in the game and I just missed it. But either way, it’s an optional discovery, so using the hints for that part was good enough for me.

And then comes that satisfying ending. Even though we’ve already seen (Spoiler - click to show)three of the depicted elementals, it was exciting to encounter the salamander and feel that suspense and then the moment of insight I already mentioned. And then we exit in the middle of a larger story, just like we entered. Sweet harmony.

The Antediluvian Weapon, by Daniel M. Stelzer

An interesting thing about the Review-a-Thon is the way it recontextualizes its entries. The IF scene being what it is, just about every game is made as an entry in some particular event, jam, or competition, each with its own design constraints, thematic points of departure, and intended audience. And while this is all generally happening under the umbrella of the larger IF community, plucking games out from their points of origin and plopping them down in the new RAT context necessarily involves some flattening and some reconfiguration, and potentially also some fuzziness of purpose – like, the emphasis here is of course on evaluation, but how much should said evaluation incorporate a rubric proper to a game’s original home?

These wooly maunderings brought to you courtesy of The Antediluvian Weapon, an entry in this year’s Text Adventure Literacy Jam, which as I understand it is an event focused on creating games that can provide an entry point to parser IF for those unconversant with its interface and foibles. Judged on its own merits, it’s quite good, a small-scale limited-parser game in all but name with some clever uses of its core mechanic and a fun, breezily-established setting with an early-modern vibe and supernatural elements focusing on magical use of, er, the elements. As an intro to parser IF, though, I’m not convinced it’s a great fit. Admittedly, this is a tough remit, but the puzzles can be rather tricky, as a limited-parser game it barely touches on the majority of standard interactions, and the tutorializing is pretty light, primarily focusing on how Dialog’s (admittedly slick) hyperlink interface works – the ABOUT text does promise a series of accompanying articles to come, but I think those are meant to be more about the process of writing the game than support in playing it, and at any rate though don’t appear to be yet in evidence.

I’m just going to leave all that aside though, because the THON isn’t the place for such critiques, and as an increasingly-grizzled veteran of the scene I’m not best suited to judge what makes for an easy intro, anyway. Antediluvian Weapon is great! I often find Stelzer’s games contain elements that I find especially appealing, and the same is true here, from the title (I am pretty sure we both picked up “antediluvian” as a cool-sounding word from being exposed to Vampire: the Masquerade at a tender age) to the Renaissance magicpunk espionage setup, which recalls Jon Ingold’s All Roads (I should really replay that one of these days…) But even if you’re a tradfantasy or sci-fi type, I think you’ll have fun here: the worldbuilding is very efficiently sketched, conveyed in a short scene of dialogue and environmental storytelling through a couple of frescos – it’s enough to sketch out the history and provide some gaps your brain can worry away at if that’s your thing, but if it’s not the mission is clear, and doesn’t require engaging with the lore if you don’t want to.

Said mission is a rescue and recovery operation, with the emphasis on the latter: another agent located the eponymous device in the fortress of a rival power before going dark, so you’re inserted via teleportation to steal the weapon, get out, and if possible help your predecessor escape. You purloin the weapon as soon as the introduction is over, so the game is entirely structured around learning what it does and deploying it in slightly different ways to overcome a series of obstacles. I won’t spoil the details, but I think it works well – the weapon’s function is relatively simple, but figuring out how to leverage it to evade the guards out to catch you requires a bit of lateral thinking, meaning the puzzles are satisfying to solve and largely hit a sweet spot in terms of difficulty.

Rescuing the other agent is a bit trickier, and turns on realizing that there’s something slightly unintuitive about how the weapon works – I think there probably would have been a way to create a smaller puzzle prompting the player to make this leap, but as it is this is an optional puzzle, with InvisiClues hints to boot, so it’s hard to complain. Meanwhile, the climactic puzzle is great, one of those set-pieces that requires you to act quickly and think outside the box, but with enough cueing and foreclosing of alternate actions to ensure that it clicks with a minimum of frustration. And while the writing is clearly in service to the puzzles – prose is generally terse and there’s a minimum of decoration, with an emphasis on clearly communicating to the player details about their environment and movement that are needed to overcome the obstacles – it manages to accomplish that goal while still being evocative and engaging.

So all told this is a great game, and I’d gladly play more with the same protagonist or the same setting; it seems a sturdy premise for unique-magic-device based IF, which can be a lot of fun. I’m not sure I’d rank it as highly as I do were I encountering it in the TALJ, but I’m not, so I do, and I’m doubly glad for playing it in the THON instead!