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Review
Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review
In my relatively short reviewing lifespan I have thrown a LOT of words at this community. I have reviewed, what, 300 some odd games at this point? Not a lot against the titans of the field but feels like a lot to me. Sure a lot of it has been goofing. A lot of it has been misguided. Some of it has been unaccountably aggressive. Underpinning it all has been real thought and reflection, such as I am capable of, and attempts to not only capture my reflexive responses to games, but to explain them to you and myself.
There are a class of games I run into periodically that I just don’t vibe with - whose gameplay, implementation, conceit or prose collide with my particular chemical stew of a brain in awkward, off putting ways. Usually, on reflection, I can extract and isolate the elements that produce that response. As often as not, it devolves down to “it’s not you, it’s me.” What is relatively new ground for me is dissecting a work that ON PAPER should be a no-brainer hit, practically engineered specifically to my brain’s exacting specifications, yet still leaves me cold. Let’s first take a look at BOSH’s spec sheet:
-Punk Rock Protagonist
-Supernatural investigation (these two caused me to proclaim “I’m Bucaroo Bonzai!”)
-wry bureaucratic comedy (promptly followed by, “ooh, no. No I’m not.”)
-experimental gameplay elements (“maybe?”)
I love all these things! Fire up the blender and let’s GOOOooo!
I then proceeded to flail around for like 45 minutes before ‘solving’ the first puzzle. By which I mean bouncing between HINT and HELP for an unaccountably long time. Look, I’m not a noob in these things. I know you have to ‘examine all you can/take whatever the game lets you.’ I’m still human though! Every now and then, parser basics elude me. Usually (as here) because of a mix of randomly non-firing neurons, plot cues that tell me ‘that’s a weird thing to do here,’ and implementation issues that have trained me to avoid some levels of detail. And yeah, a lot of that is in play here, but I’ve powered through much worse.
I think what really got me about this first puzzle is that it introduced a FUNDAMENTAL gameplay element, required to navigate this game, yet was content to sit quietly on the shelf until I stumbled into it. This is a single item, no more or less attractive/weird than anything else in the world, that was so critical to the plot that it’s absence left a canyon before me, with progress smugly laughing on the other side. There was literally nothing to accomplish before I somehow stumbled across it. My advice would be: narrative chokepoint items deserve more deliberate, redundant in-game cluing. I have in the past advocated for a ‘rule of three’ clues in open world mystery games, maximizing the player’s chances of navigating solution chokepoints. That advice feels relevant here also.
Consulting the HELP/HINT system was insult on injury for me. The two are decidedly different experiences. HINTs are reasonably traditional, though with a command-line engagement paradigm it took a moment to orient on. HELP was another thing altogether. HELP transported you to another dimensional world to explore (with no narrative justification, which ehh ok…). This other world? Required exploration, object manipulation and NPC interaction to wring information out of. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand something about HELP/HINTS: when you engage them, you have resigned yourself to defeat. The objective is to get the nudge you need and return as quickly as possible to the source of your humiliation, never acknowledging your shortcomings again. A long, drawn out side quest, THE RESULT OF WHICH IS NO HELP WHATSOEVER, is exactly the WRONG thing to shunt that impatient player into. I am quite sure, btw, that this choice has a purpose, and that there are classes of blockage that HELP can resolve, and maybe even with some humor and aplomb. In particular, players new to parser gameplay might find this a sly training/orientation scenario. (Seriously though, are there any of those here? Enough to justify this level of mini-game?) Here’s the thing, as a player you have no way of knowing WHICH problems HELP is engineered around v standard HINTS, and boy is consulting it a chore when it’s not appropriate.
Once that particular problem (finding that keystone magic object) was ungated, it was back to a more traditional experience, but everything was just a bit more difficult than it needed to be. One NPC’s behavior seemed to change, such that what had happened once or twice on its own, now needed opaque actions from me to goose. (It is certainly possible that the first two times were NOT automatic, but the text cluing sure let me believe that.) There was a little more friction in discovering just how central the new mechanism was to proceedings, and then, only then, did things blossom into a real mission of sorts.
Oh wait, no, not just yet. First you had to navigate a 4-dimensional space! Ok, as a gameplay mechanism and conceit this was legitimately interesting. The MECHANICS of discovering and decoding it, however, were not. It involved reverse engineering a series of repeated moves 10s/100s of times, with a ‘clue’ that legitimately had multiple interpretations to test and reject. I probably spent another half hour or more fiddling with this because it took that long mechanically, not intellectually. Yeah, I did it, because that’s how my just-shy-of-OCD brain works, but the enjoyment ramp was a slowly descending one. I knew I was in trouble when, after believing I had decoded things sufficiently, I analyzed a remaining clue and said “that probably means X. Wait. There’s no way it means something that obvious, given the sisyphean task I just completed. Let me noodle for another 5-10 minutes… nothing. ok go to HINTs.” You have probably already sussed out it was in fact X.
Quick check: probably 3/4s of the judging time elapsed, and only now getting to the ‘true’ story to solve! While I deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this for sure, it is my nature to blame to others for my shortcomings. There is an argument that gameplay choices are partially to blame. Also partially to blame are implementation gaps. These are not overwhelming, as these things go, but were low key present throughout, blossoming to this exchange, right at the 2hr mark:
Extended game quote
> x obelisk
Which do you mean, the ladder or the obelisk?
> * wot? [note, ladder never mentioned before]
There’s nothing like that nearby.
> x ladder
There’s nothing like that nearby.
> read names
Which do you mean, the obelisk or the names?
> read obelisk names
Its faux Egyptian design is incongruous adjacent to the adamantly
traditional town hall. Faraji can just make out a small crystal adornment
rising from the top.
I think my frustration with this game was not only (or not specifically) that I struggled with its puzzle construction and hint system and implementation so much, but that because of my struggles it did not deliver on the promises its conceit made to me. Let’s review:
-Punk Rock Protagonist: never really factored into anything, narratively
-Supernatural investigation: got only a small flavor of this by the 2hr mark
-wry bureaucratic comedy: let me flounder here for waay too long, apparently only engageable AFTER the supernatural portion
-experimental gameplay elements: so fiddly as to mute their appreciation
Ok, in spite of what amounts to a VERY extended whine-fest about this work, I can for sure say it was never mechanical. Its setup fully engaged me. Even as I was cursing the particulars of its 4D navigation puzzles, I did very much like the fact of it. There is a consistent wry humor that, during moments I was not clawing at my eye sockets, did land for me. I went a LONG way into a DARK hole to just say “Sparks of Joy” but yeah, that’s where we top out. In deference to my own limitations, it even earned a generous “Notable” rather than “Intrusive” gameplay.
Played: 10/9/24
Playtime: 2hr, unfinished, captured by lizard folk
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable vocab/gameplay difficulties
Would Play Again?: There’s like a whole essay worth of thoughts here. A 2.0 version of this game, filed, sanded, buffed and polished… probably? I mean it is STILL engineered to my brain pan. But if I do, how do I shrug the weight of these two hours and give it a fair shot? If I encounter a remaining rough spot, how generous can I be? WHY AM I THE VILLAIN HERE???
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
