Alana's Dungeon

When I was ten or eleven, my parents put me in a weekend enrichment program at the local college. It involved doing something other than watching cartoons on Saturday morning, so I wasn’t super psyched about that, and I remember being very irked by this problem-solving class I took because the teacher was walking us through the steps you’re supposed to take when faced with a challenge, and while I don’t quite recall what the actual example was, I have pellucid clarity on the fact that during the brainstorming phase, another kid said that we could fix the problem by turning the earth’s rotation backwards to reverse time, like Superman does in the movie, and a) that’s now how time works, GREGORY (I’m not pellucidly clear on whether the kid’s name was actually Gregory but such are the vagaries of memory), and b) even if it was, you could solve any problem that way so it was a bad idea to offer in a class about how to solve different kinds of problems.

Anyway other than that problematic experience, there was a computer lab where you could mess around with BASIC, and after I finished the suggested assignments I would write my own little text adventures. I wasn’t rolling my own parser or anything, I was and remain a mediocre-at-best coder, but my skills were sufficient to create a “DO YOU GO LEFT OR RIGHT?” prompt and then use GOTOs based on string matching to the player’s input. I say “player’s” but I really mean “my” – because of course nobody ever played these things, maybe once or twice I saved them on a floppy to bring home but I wasn’t nearly self-assured enough to browbeat my sister or friends into giving them a spin. Not that they were missing much: there were a lot of entirely-unsignaled insta-deaths, with uninspired quest plots in entirely generic fantasy settings not offering anything to those willing to put up with the punishing gameplay.

Alana’s Dungeon, then, makes me kind of jealous. It’s a simple dungeon-crawling Inform game created by a grandfather based on his eight-year-old granddaughter’s ideas and designs, and if the play experience is rather pedestrian, I can imagine that the creative process was loads of fun. Having a grown-up sufficiently interested to work with you on something like this seems like a dream come true, validating in itself but also offering a chance to bring your brainstorms to life with way more sophistication than a child’s grasp of programming can achieve. I’m hoping this is a gateway to more games from this team – imagine what this kid could accomplish with ten more years in the game!

Turning to the game itself, I enjoyed the pervasive enthusiasm: when you put on your armor, you’re told “this is a perfect fit! I feel invulnerable”, and the armor is useful because there’s a DnD style combat engine, because why not. The fact that one of the puzzles centers around having to open four different drawers on a desk in order to find a key is ingenuously charming, too. I didn’t love that winning requires releasing an orc from a cage just so you can kill him, but eight is maybe a little young to have the decolonizing-DnD talk. Similarly, there’s one unfair puzzle here, since escaping from the dungeon requires examining stairs that you’re explicitly told are no longer present, since they retracted into the ceiling after you went down them, but given the paucity of stuff to interact with it’s not that hard to figure out, and getting to the answer made me feel clever as intended.

So yeah, judged as an exercise in puzzle-creation and prose-authoring, Alana’s Dungeon is okay even if it’s no great shakes. But judged as a time machine that recaptures a little bit of what it was like to be a kid and so excited to take something out of your head and make it real? There’s not too many games out there that can even attempt to do that.