The Antediluvian Weapon

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!