Captain Piedaterre's Blunders

I love rats, and I enjoyed Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (both when I first played it and after replaying it today in preparation to play CPB)—so I was primed to enjoy this short spoof game, and enjoy it I did! You play as the titular Captain Piedaterre, a rat captain with a distinctly different approach to life than your brother Verdeterre’s. Discovering exactly how this game inverts the conceit of Verdeterre is part of its charm, so I’ll include the details under spoiler tags below.

First, a note about the interface: this is a choice-based game implemented in Inform 7; there’s no typing (unless you choose to hit number keys to choose from the list of options), just hyperlinks. Overall it works well, with the two caveats that the blue link text on the black background doesn’t have great contrast (an issue that’s worsened if you replay, as all the links then turn to dark purple), and that the autoscroll is very jerky. There’s probably a better way to describe it, but the result is that each link click results in a rather jarring movement of the text.

Now on to the actual game! With the PC’s latest ship sunk, he washes ashore near the house of a pirate who happens not to be home. The gameplay has you searching the house for loot, of which there is plenty(Spoiler - click to show)—but it’s not the actually-valuable items, like a diamond or a Fabergé egg, that you want; rather, the things that are treasures in the PC’s eyes are items like a broken chair leg, a black banana, a dust bunny. While taking each of the actual valuables is presented as an option, clicking those links will simply tell you why Captain P. doesn’t want them. The gimmick of “ignore the jewels, the garbage is the real treasure!” was amusing, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome; once you’ve collected all seven items (with no time pressure or optimization-replays needed), you’re whisked out of the house to “the one and only end”, where you show off your haul to your baffled brother.

Without the context of CVP, this game might not make much sense or be particularly engaging, but the contrast between the two made it a humorous experience. And while (Spoiler - click to show)there are indications that Captain P. is meant to not be very bright, my interpretation—as a former pet-rat owner—is that, unlike his brother, he’s a much more typical rat, drawn to hoarding bits of junk. My rats wouldn’t have cared about a diamond, but they would have loved an overripe banana! Other things they liked to steal and hide included pens and dog toys. So the rattiness of this game brought an extra layer of enjoyment to it for me. (I also have to shout out the Bop-it joke—for whatever reason, it hit me just right.)

What makes a Verdeterre-like a Verdeterre-like? A design-focused analysis of the subgenre would zero in on key elements of Captain Verdeterre’s Treasure, the game that launched the mini-trend: high-score-chasing gameplay, a time limit, a complex optimization metapuzzle providing a framework around the individual challenges, and an expectation of multiple replays to come to terms with all of the above. Captain Piedaterre’s Blunders, however, has a much simpler answer: just put Captain Verdeterre, the world’s snarkiest rat pirate, in the game.

Mr. Green-dirt only has a glorified cameo at the end, however – instead looting duties fall this time to his cousin, the eponymous Captain Piedaterre. That punny name is one of the one and a half very solid jokes in this short choice-based take on the formula. The half is the Piedaterre takes the adage that one person rat’s trash is another’s treasure a bit too literally; as you run around a treasure-laden pirate ship (not your own), you reject the shiny stuff in favor of everyday dross. There’s a bit of backstory here that explains the source of this curious approach to valuation, and provides a sample of the game’s breezy prose:

"This splintered chair leg lights the corners of my mind. It reminds me of the day when, as a wee rat, I fell off a broken chair and landed on my head. Coincidentally, that was the day I discovered I had exceptional taste in all aesthetic matters."

Despite its choice-based interface, the game is unexpectedly written in Inform, with a convenient set of options enabling you to make choices by clicking hyperlinks a la Twine, typing a number, or both. The system itself works well, but I ran into some broader UI issues when playing via the browser, as “More” prompts kept popping up and requiring me to scroll down to the bottom of the window in order for new keypresses to register; sometimes a simple space bar or page-down would do the trick, but other times I was reduced to using the mouse to manually drag down the scroll bar, which was finicky process – fortunately the clickable links helped avoid this issue when it got too annoying.

For all that there was clearly a lot of time spent on the interface, I did find the substance of the game rather bare. It doesn’t wear out its welcome, to its credit, but as mentioned, it forgoes the dynamism and optimization of the core Verdeterre-like gameplay loop in favor of presenting a static environment with few puzzles; you mostly just walk through the small map grabbing whatever bits of dross you see (and if you don’t see any upon entering a room, you just poke and prod at the scenery until you find it). For a short comedy game, it’s fine, but since it so clearly invokes the original, it can’t help but suffer from the comparison – really, that title is a magnificent gag that deserves at least a little follow-up (I would love to see how Captain Piedaterre’s city apartment is decorated).