The Reliques of Tolti-Aph

This is another game I've had for many years on my wishlist. I've attempted it quite a few times but as it has many frequent death traps, randomized combat, no UNDO and no SAVE for the first chunk of the game, I never got very far in my attempts over the years.

This time, I finished it with the aid of David Welbourn's walkthrough.

Combat RPGs written in Inform are often unenjoyable in a way that CRPGs and TTRPGs are not. Kerkerkruip, Little Match Girl 3, and Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom are some examples of fun Inform RPGs, but most are pretty bleak. What gives?

For me at least, the fun of both TTRPGs and CRPGS is discovery, storytelling, and getting new gear or skills that makes previously-difficult challenges feasible. While TTRPGs ostensibly threaten player death, every time I've DMd or been in a group we work around that (a god revives you but requires a quest; the enemy leaves one of you alive and laughs at you, calling you weaklings who don't merit death, etc.). In CRPGs, you can restore and grind or walk around and at least try a new path or see new things.

With Inform, though, dying and retrying almost never produces new content or interesting story changes. You can just memorize the sequence of necessary moves and race through, not bothering to reread text for the 20th time. Endless, Nameless even makes fun of this in a way, letting you just RECORD a series of moves to REPLAY every time you reenter the world.

So we have a sequence of tedious moves. And authors frequently disable UNDO or SAVE to keep players from savescumming. Why? Because there's no reason not to savescum when you have boring gameplay.

The fun RPGs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they have a hierarchy of encounters where high ones kill you quickly but low ones leave powerups. So it becomes a strategy/puzzle game where you have to optimize your path through the encounters.

In the wider field of Choice-based IF, I've played plenty of great RPG games, of which I especially like VtM: Night Road and Werewolf: Book of Hungry Names (although I played with a profanity filter). These are more like the TTRPG approach mentioned above; you can theoretically die, but usually instead losing your health just gives you horrific in-game consequences like going on a rampage.

Anyway, this game doesn't do any of those fun things. It's a bog-standard Combat RPG with automatically-generated rounds of randomized dice roll, traps, and (a trope I quite earnestly dislike) a magic system that consumes your health. I don't think I've ever completed a game with that type of magic system on my own (like Chronicles of the Moorwakker). If there was a wondrous story that you could be rewarded with, that would be better, but it's just standard DnD with wry little twists (like a Were Spider instead of other were-creatures or a Wyvern instead of Dragons because this is called Woodpulp and Wyverns in-game).

Everything is polished and smooth; the line-by-line writing is good. It's just that these excellent authoring and programming skills were turned towards a goal which I don't much care for, and quite a few haven't cared for either.

For an RPG-adjacent game by Graham Nelson, I much prefer Balances.