The Master's Lair

I’m not finished with this game, but have played more than 2 hours. I’d be happy to finish it later, though!

I’ve seen this game before in the German Grand Prix. I had a goal to beat every game, but when I saw this very large puzzle fest with many complex German words I was overcome by the difficulty and gave up on the Grand Prix.

So it was nice to see an English translation! It also seems to have been updated with new puzzles and more points (2000 vs 810).

You play as a magician seeking a mystical jewel of life hidden in a master magician’s lair. Once you find it, though, you realize that getting out is a whole different problem.

The game has a humorous tone and a wide variety of puzzles. It leans a bit to the risque side, as the master has pornography and is known for seeking after young women.

Gameplay can vary between traditional parser and choice-based, depending on your settings. In choice-based mode, nouns have a drop-down menu with actions, some of which involve other nouns. There are many possibilities, which is good and bad; good because you have to think and can’t just lawnmower through all choices, but bad because it can be hard to find the right option.

I found the puzzles very interesting, especially those involving the stuffed animals. My biggest difficulties were with objects where you need to USE one object WITH another, but if you get the order wrong it doesn’t work (so, for instance, using a key with a door might work but not a door with a key).

There are some minor errors here and there that can be confusing. I had a problem with a snake that I messaged the author about but which I think might be soon fixed, so I’ll update once I get past that part. There is a very helpful hint system with three levels of hints, although occasionally some things don’t have hints or the hints aren’t a complete solution.

I think the only drawback some people may not like is the sheer number of options, with many rooms having many objects which have many interactions. Playing it as a parser game can help, but some objects don't respond to their in-game names (like 'left shelf' must be referred to as 'leftmost shelf', I think). I think the people who will like this most are people who like Steve Meretzky’s games (I feel like the tone and puzzles are similar) and are patient with working through puzzles involving a lot of careful examination.

I firmly believe that ideas are a dime a dozen, especially when it comes to IF: it’s not too hard to come up with a clever, compelling premise, just as it’s very easy to completely flub a promising concept with weak implementation, half-baked design, and boring prose. Execution is all, I’ve been known to say, stroking my chin and self-satisfied at my hard-won wisdom. And yet, for all that I believe that’s true when assessing the fundamental quality of a game (whatever that means), there are practical issues that arise when trying to writeup up said assessment in a review: for a game that trades on innovative mechanics or complex, heady themes, it makes sense to spend reviewing real-estate describing and interpreting these novelties without deigning to pass judgment. For a regular-degular game, though, that at a high level is similar to a dozen others I, and basically everyone, has played before, it’s hard to avoid a review turning into a straightforward, largely uninteresting evaluation of whether it’s any good or not, because there’s not much else of interest to talk about.

The Master’s Lair has a few aspects that help it stand out from the crowd, for good or ill (smaller examples for good: the player character is cheerfully amoral, a wizard’s apprentice upset at his treatment and therefore bent on stealing his erstwhile teacher’s prized artifact. Now ill: the game’s offered exclusively as a download from the Microsoft Store, which I think I previously hadn’t known existed). It’s also written in a custom parser engine that can in theory toggle without interruption into choice-based mode, where you click on object names and use a multiple-choice interface to build a command instead of just typing it.

But for the most part, this is a Zorkian-in-the-zany-sense romp around a wizard’s lab, collecting spell components and artifacts in order to circumvent a series of medium-dry-goods puzzles and lift Foozle’s folderol. There’s a maze with a gimmick. There are safe combinations to be guessed. There are rituals to be studied in books and performed at a workbench, with the appropriate ingredients to hand. It’s classic stuff that can certainly be appealing, but it doesn’t really win much goodwill just from its setup, given how generic it appears. And so my brain inevitably starts turning over the question of whether it’s a good version of these tropes, for lack of anything else to analyze.

To jump ahead to the end, I think it does fine, but there are a few questionable decisions in its design and interface that wind up making the Master’s Lair less engaging than it could have been. Starting out with the narrative level, it fritters away its antihero framing more or less immediately; the PC makes snide comments about the eponymous Master throughout the game, and does succeed in stealing his most powerful magical item, but this is just a thin patina of flavor sprinkled across a very standard adventure: the “bad guy stealing stuff” angle only lasts maybe ten minutes, at which point you could be swapped for the Zork guy with no real difference in behavior. The twist at the halfway mark further undermines any ambiguity you could read into the piece, with the Master’s vices expanding from being gross with the female students he teaches (bad enough as that is), to grand-guignol horrors that indicate that he’s taken inspiration from the seminal Mountain Goats/John Vanderslice EP Moon Colony Bloodbath (Spoiler - click to show)(yeah he’s running an organ-harvesting colony on the moon). It’s a tonal left turn that left me with whiplash, and also flattens out any sense that the protagonist was anything out of the ordinary.

At the implementation level, the variety of interface options is impressive – after struggling through Sidekick, this click-to-build-a-command approach felt much more intuitive to me, and there’s apparently even a voice-activated mode that I didn’t get a chance to test out. But while my preference would have been to stick with the classic parser approach, I ultimately found myself using the link-based interface due to bugs and design oversights. For example, an early scene listed a “low building” as being present, and highlighted the words to indicate I could interact with it, but X LOW, X BUILDING, and X LOW BUILDING all let to confusing errors. Clicking on it eventually revealed that this was just an incompletely-implemented synonym for the hut that’s also in that area, so I could have saved myself some trouble. Similarly, there’s a “high platform” that’s really an “ornate platform”, not that you’d know from the room description, among many other examples, some of which extend to not being sure which verbs would work until I checked out what the interaction menus were suggesting (there’s a switch that gives a deeply unhelpful you-can’t-do-that response when you PUSH it, since only PRESS will work). These tendencies were so pronounced that by the halfway mark I was only using the parser for commands I knew the game would accept, like navigation, using the multiple-choice interface as the most honest guide to what I was seeing and what I could do with it.

Admittedly, some of these implementation hiccups might reflect incomplete translation; Master’s Lair was originally a German game so it’s great to see it available in English, but it still throws up the occasional awkward phrase or untranslated chunk of text. These are no big deal in of themselves, but do suggest that there’s something of a mismatch between the modeled world and the text used to describe it. There were also a few times when I had to go to the hints because the language led me to create a mental picture entirely at odds with what the game thought it was saying – I had no idea what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show) tiny sugar tongs because their operation has to do with the big gem you’re tying to steal, and I hadn’t thought the gem was that small (I’m also not sure whether there are in-game cues about what you’re supposed to do with the gem once you steal it).

With that said, the puzzle design is generally good and has some fresh elements – as the blurb says, a number of the challenges involve talking with, and leveraging the talents of, some magically-reanimated stuffed animals, and I had a fun time with all of these. The scavenger hunts to get the reagents you need for the various plot-advancing spells also pass the time in an entertaining way, although the instructions for how to actually cast the spells once you’ve got the goods could stand to be spelled out (that also meant walkthrough time for me, admittedly also because I think the ritual-critical mortar and pestle aren’t actually mentioned in the room where they’re found). But there are some read-the-authors’ mind moments too, like how exactly you’re supposed to use the milky-glass box or what the math clue the rustling shadow gives you decodes to. The in-game hint menu provides some guidance, and there’s a separate walkthrough too, though, so at least I was rarely completely stuck for long. But again, it’s a mixed bag.

I have a bunch of additional specific examples of everything I’ve mentioned above, but nothing else I noted down that would fundamentally shift how you view a game like this – again, it’s pretty much exactly the game it appears to be, modulo that ill-advised twist that winds up mostly just shunting you into a slightly different flavor of the kind of story you’re already experiencing. If that’s your jam, good news, Master’s Lair will scratch the itch, but if not, you might find your critical faculties getting overly-judgey about its real but not especially major flaws, if only to have something new to think about.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

CONTINUING (*cough*cough*) my review sub-series “Second Breakfast,” wherein I examine IFCOMP24 works of light fantasy and heavy puzzle play, we land on ML.

Usually my review sub-series are a humorous jab at categorizations - superficially grouping works together because I find that amusing but ultimately still treating works as unique things. With this grouping though I kind of outfoxed myself. By defining the category so broadly, I have kind of engaged those categorizations in other reviews and said pretty much what I needed to there. Quick recap: “Second Breakfast” games admirably echo early IF preoccupations and genre conceits. While that echo is at least partially the point of these works, for those of us who have consumed a LOT of these, they will live and die on how they distinguish themselves from the others in this category - usually via engaging puzzle play or narrative singularity.

Puzzle play can be undone by insufficient new puzzle mechanics and/or suffering technical implementation issues; narrative can be undone by lack of defining hook. Let me just say the ML narrative did not do it for me. Yes, there is always some fun in a venal protagonist (here opposing a skeevy antagonist(!)), and the prose was certainly bubbly. Acknowledging all that, the core story just didn’t extend beyond its clear function, setup for the deep puzzle play.

There was an interesting new puzzle mechanic introduced in ML, one I am going to keep in shadow in interest of spoilers. I WILL say it requires a singular, chokepoint object where most of the game is locked out of reach until it is secured. Unfortunately, if the importance and abilities of this object are clued, they are under-clued. Given the narrative setup, I talked myself into leaving it be while I tried to resolve the rest of the problem set. I figured it was going to be fine to get it at the end. It took some extended flailing, then consulting of hints to disabuse myself of that notion. I have in the past advocated for stronger cluing of objects that represent narrative chokepoints, and that applies here for sure.

But, once the hint system informed me of my misapprehension, the gameplay did take an interesting turn, with a new-feeling mechanism to add to the search-find-use staples. This MIGHT have pushed things up a bit, had there not been so many implementation issues. The game was rife with missing nouns, key items missing from room desciptions, plural nouns not responding to singulars, even some text translation misses in the hint system. These glitches were pretty common and frequent.

So let’s talk UI, the place where this game really comes into its own. The game implements a multi-tier parser->link select hybrid system. I chose to play on ‘full parser’ mode, though two other settings let players dial it harder to the hypertext side. That’s kinda cool. It also has a LOT of customizable gameplay hooks, MOST of which are adequately described at the beginning of the game. Those that aren’t become clearer as the game goes on.

What really tickled me about it though, was how the hybrid clicking was not DISABLED during parser play, it was just deemphasized. This choice acted as a first-level safety net for its own parser limitations. Any time I started to struggle with missing nouns, weird syntax gaps or picky command constructs, I could rely on the available links to provide the ‘right’ command. This UI fortified itself against its own parser bugs! This simple mechanism did SO much to smooth over the rough spots in gameplay that it kept me cooking along where other games might have increasingly infuriated me. It’s not that the UI was revolutionary, you’ve seen most of these hooks before, it was just how well integrated those hooks were and how well they played off each other. It was truly a “greater than sum of parts” situation and created a unique-feeling player experience, explicitly reducing internal frictions.

This story was more functional than engaging, an excuse for old-school puzzle play. It had some amount of verve and humor to its prose, but all fairly low key. The new puzzle mechanism was fun, though parser implementation issues eroded a lot of that away. If I’m honest, it was still a mostly Mechanical experience with lots of Notable implementation gaps. I definitely owe it a bonus point for the weird, pleasant alchemy of its UI though. I do look forward to future works with this engine!

Played: 10/11/24
Playtime: 2hr, score 610/2000, -1000 for leaving fridge open, lol
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/notable implementation gaps, bonus for friction-reducing parser/click hybrid
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless