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A fun romp through well-loved classics, November 23, 2021If an entry in IFComp is going to have one word (articles don't count,) then "Library" has to be up there near the top for me. I enjoy searching libraries, hanging out in them, or just finding a new city library branch to visit when, okay, I could've pulled an intralibrary loan, but I wanted some minimal adventure. And I wasn't disappointed. It's quite a fun game, and the writing is smooth, no small feat when English is not the writer's first language.
After meeting with an odd librarian and given a red pill (don't worry, here a pill is just a pill,) you're sent into a maze of twelve rooms, each named after a famed author, to rescue Edmond Dantes. Yes, a maze of twelve rooms–each has three others adjacent, and instead of compass directions, you can go back, left and right. Left (or right) then back from one room always leads you to that room.
TLDR for the comp release: the map is the trickiest part of the game, and I want to mention it up front, because it's well worth having a map by your side to subvert this, so the actual fun bits flow. Don't map it yourself, unless you really enjoy that sort of thing. Crib off someone else so the story doesn't get buried. The author originally meant to have 20 rooms in a Hunt the Wumpus sort of dodecahedron structure but cut it to twelve, leaving a few odd loops. The numbers just don't work out to make things symmetrical. Left and right looping in the first room gives two tidy pentagons, but then the map gets stickier. However, for the post-comp release, everything may be more symmetrical.
That said, the interface overall provides a good deal of innovative convenience. It's text at the top, and you can click on the important things to examine them. Books are the big one. In each library room, clicking on a book opens it, where you open it to enter the book itself. Then you find a bookmark to read the relevant passage that helps you understand what to do. Then you can drag and drop one item onto another to see if they work together. You can, of course, escape with no penalty if you're missing an item from another book. So the game has a parser feel without, well, fighting the parser.
So it helps to make a relatively smooth game once you enter the book in the actual room. Which is pretty cool, because though the idea of book crossovers has been done before, often in other books, having twelve to choose from is quite a task! In a linear book, it might be a bit messy, but here, there's a lot of fun. It may be tough to figure what to do first, as there's a lot of randomness involved, and there's no really logical way to say "Hey, I have to read this book first." It's not chronological. But I really enjoyed how some items linked up. You need to use Alice's cake to make someone grow. You need a way to kill Dracula. Dr. Frankenstein repairs someone's body with surgery. Edmond Dantes gets swallowed by the whale as in Pinocchio, with a crossover to Moby Dick. The connections are whimsical and quickly make sense most of the time. For me it was a bit odd to see Ulysses do something to get himself killed, until I realized, given the authors, where the action would lead. This all was a bit of a stretch–taking one step back to take two forward–but it was still entertaining.
The only thing I disliked about the interface was how left/back/right, for navigation, seemed to change order arbitrarily, making the maze even trickier. So when I wanted to try to loop to the left, or to the right, I had to pay more attention. And sometimes the page-turning special-effect, while a nice surprise in the introduction, wasn't what I wanted when I was trying to figure a puzzle. The author knows of this, and they were really receptive to feedback in-comp, so if there is a post-comp version, this may not be a problem for you.
But the puzzles are fun, and you really only need a passing familiarity with any of the books in the game. We all know the story of Gulliver being the giant, or Ulysses and the cyclops, and The Library weaves them together quite well. It kept me entertained and then some.
Sticklers will point to the map, or how some of the book scenarios are a bit off. Or how you have to take one step backwards to take two forward, e.g. by getting Ulysses killed. This may not be peak narrative and puzzles, but it's more than good enough, and it's still a lot of fun. If the rest of the game weren't very smooth, this wouldn't have stood out. Because combining books isn't a shoo-in. For instance, Edward Eager's children's stories are quite fun, as they go poking into other books, but there's a bit too much fourth-wall stuff and overt self-awareness and "ooh what a mess we made," and not enough getting on with it. Sierra's Mixed Up Mother Goose had its own simplistic charm, but it was mostly a fetch quest that just made sure younger gamers knew heir nursery rhymes, some of which made me cringe even when I was young.
The Library throws stuff together without saying "Ha ha, oops, I'm a bit disorganized, and that's part of the joke." While I think there's work worth doing for a post-comp release, it certainly made my gaming side assume a crossover among my favorite books would be easy. My programming and designing side knows better, and I'm glad The Library made it in, and I think if The Library 2 appeared in a future IFComp, I'd bump it up in the random order the website gave me.
