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.)