Familiar Problems

You are a familiar - a homunculus, a little man in the bottle - except you're not gendered, not at all human, and definitely not in a bottle. You've just been created, and aware of your own existence. But you are alone, and your creator is nowhere to be seen. Luckily, you have a special ability - to synthesize yourself with every other familiar you come across to take THEIR special abilities. Your goal? Escape the facility you were born in and take vengeance on your indifferent master!

Familiar Problems is a great little game that positively vibrates (RESONATES, even) with personality, every detail of the world it is set in placed there with purpose and care. Once the mechanics of your powers are worked out, the way you use them to solve the various puzzles in the facility becomes clear, though it may take a little while. There is a helpful ASCII map at the top to aid with navigation but, uh, I kind of only noticed it about two-thirds of the way through, haha.

This ticked all of my boxes, and I will definitely check out the other Stelzer works in time. My only real complaint is the length, and I hope there's a sequel or two in the pipeline, because this mechanic has legs (spindly compass ones, of course). Five blobs of bluish-green fluid out of five.

Familiar Problems is a fantasy puzzle parser in which you wake up as some experimental familiar in a magical school, realising your creator is nowhere to be found. What to do then? Escape and plot your revenge, of course! Is it doable? As a blob of green slime, it’s going to be challenging but not impossible. Along the way, you encounter other familiars, each with different abilities, which you can consume and acquire to move around the map and solve the different puzzles. The game also includes a map and hints/nudges to progress.

It’s a well polished game, with a satisfying gameplay, and just charmingly fun! You start with limited actions, with a set of commands that builds up as you gather more power (i.e. consume things and others). The progression makes sense, as each power is there to solve a subsequent puzzle/block (sometimes even working in combination!), and the puzzles have the right amount of difficulty that it feels really good when solved (the nudges and map help a ton when stuck, but good old trial-n-error did most of the work for me). As well, the game does take advantage of the Dialog program, enabling players to choose whether to input commands or clicking on the actions (or both, in my case, especially for the map and fast travelling the places).

I really enjoyed helping the lil’ blob getting its bearing and figuring out how to get out of the building. There are a tons of fun stuff to discover in the game (the announcement messages got me to chuckle every time), that really adds to the funky atmosphere here. Honestly, one of the strongest parser I’ve played recently!

I playtested this game and have replayed the published version. I can’t really comment on the difficulty of the puzzles because I remembered all the solutions from when I tested (and the ones I struggled with a bit when testing have been updated since), but here are my thoughts otherwise!

First, the game is just plain fun. I enjoyed the slightly wacky magical university setting, learning about the mishaps inherent to this kind of school and the safety measures in place to mitigate them, the rivalries between the philosophy and chemistry departments, and other bits of lore. Of course, as a little blobby synthesis familiar, the PC doesn’t care about any of that! They care about increasing their abilities so they can escape and have their revenge on the creator who abandoned them. I enjoyed the progression of gaining new abilities and realizing/discovering where they’d be useful to gain access to new places and/or abilities, especially given that most were used for multiple puzzles; I liked getting to apply them in a variety of situations. (Spoiler - click to show)The prepare/escape power was especially cool, creating a navigation puzzle with one-way teleportation. The number of powers never got overwhelming, either; each has such limited, specific use cases that there was no temptation (or need) to lawnmower. (Spoiler - click to show)Soliloquize, the one ability that’s not needed to solve any puzzles, was a nice extra touch, increasing my engagement by letting me (pretend to) make grand speeches at dramatic moments.

The dynamically updating map is great; I love a handy in-game map, and very much appreciated the convenience of being able to click on a room to travel there. I did find, on this replay at least, that the exclamation points marking the room(s) where you can progress were a little too much; I wanted to have to think a little more about where to go/what to do next, instead of just gravitating to the exclamation point.

Finally, my only other more critical thought is that I felt conflicted about consuming the other familiars. They’re alive on some level, at least as sentient as our blob PC, so while the PC certainly has no qualms, I balked a little as a player, not liking the thought that I was overpowering and killing these creatures. This is very idiosyncratic to me of course, but I’ll always prefer teamwork/compassionate approaches over violence/aggression. But this definitely didn’t bother me enough to impede my enjoyment of the game!