A Matter of Heist Urgency

by FLACRabbit

Episode 1 of Anastasia the Power Pony
Superhero
2022

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The only thing missing is an ad for breakfast cereal..., December 15, 2023

[Full Disclosure: I know the author of this work personally, and I served as a beta tester for this game.]

"I don't want to play in a world where I can't kick a pirate using karate." So said Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, in a 1988 article about Plundered Hearts (MIT Technology Review, May/June 1988, p. 16). Well, Janet... it took almost 35 years, but your cri du coeur has been answered!

A Matter of Heist Urgency is an unusual offering. Rooted in a series of silly short stories written for a grade schooler who enjoys horses and superheroes, it was developed into a short game as a fun way of introducing that grade schooler to interactive fiction. Having reached about 25,000 words in size and a level of playability that was very newbie-friendly, it was then further developed to be an entry in IF Comp 2022, doubling its word count in the process. The result is a fast-paced, smoothly-flowing, and very amusing short game that has been favorably compared to a Saturday morning kids' cartoon.

The game is "puzzleless" in the sense that there is nothing intended to impede the story's progression to its successful conclusion. By the same token, it is "merciful" on the Zarfian scale -- the player may be left with varying degrees of satisfaction at the outcome, but the player character cannot die or even really lose. That said, the game does reward engagement, and there is some light thinking to be done in order to achieve the highest rankings, which are issued at the end of the game even though there is no formal score. (To be less ambiguous, I should instead say that the game has no point rewards; it does indeed have a musical score.)

Critical reception in the context of the competition was mixed. The "marketing materials" (i.e. cover and blurb) developed for the game emphasize the word "heist" in the title, which may set genre expectations of a complex puzzling-solving exercise involving tight timing and intricate details. (This perception may also be reinforced by the blurb's claim of a "robust" hint system, though in hindsight that is clearly tongue-in-cheek.) In contrast, the cover illustration depicts cartoon horses and a pirate ship, and the blurb characterizes the game as "a delightfully short action-comedy" with "intense fights with kung-fu llamas," so arguably it delivers exactly what it says on the tin.

The humor of the piece is its strong point, but it is also perhaps idiosyncratic. Players seem to decide whether or not the game appeals to them very quickly, beginning with their perception of the pun in the title. Much of the humor depends on juxtaposition: The illustration of Anastasia as a rainbow-maned equine invites a comparison to "My Little Pony," but the way the plot plays out is closer to "The A-Team."

The game's tone is unapologetically playful, and it works best when approached in a playful mood. The setting is essentially the Land of Make Believe, which you may recall spending time in as a child. Character archetypes are deployed without any consideration for historical accuracy; instead they are chosen to evoke a specific mood and expectations in the player. This creates a fluid version of in-game reality that can subject the player to surprises(Spoiler - click to show) (a pirate with a jetpack??) but still feels consistent in the sense of keeping the scenario and the interaction fun.

Personally, I have found the game to be very enjoyable, even through many replays, because there are countless details in the implementation that reward you for poking around by responding with small jokes. I am especially impressed by one of the new scenes added post-competition (in release 5): It is a very "cinematic" flashback sequence using a method of synchronized music and text that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, though a similar technique was later employed in Little Match Girl 4. (Note that this scene is shown only if you are victorious in the first fight; if you lose, you instead get to play a very funny interlude from the protagonist's early training.)

As you have no doubt gathered by now, this is not a "serious" piece. However, its development was taken seriously by the author, first with the intention of creating a memorable and enjoyable introduction to interactive fiction, then with the intention of crafting a light-hearted and diverting short experience for judges working through a field of entries that generally strive for more literary merit.

Given my involvement, it's not appropriate to let my star rating count toward the average, but I give it high marks due to its very good implementation quality, memorable and amusing characters, and judicious use of sound. I encourage everyone looking for a half hour of pure entertainment to give this piece a try. I also highly encourage use of a sound-capable interpreter, which is essential for appreciating the scene-enhancing music and the special flashback sequence mentioned above.

Note: this rating is not included in the game's average.
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- infinityto1, July 11, 2023

- Jade68, June 18, 2023

- Edo, May 18, 2023

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
...in other news: Horse climbs ladder..., February 13, 2023
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

With the snooping detective work at the start and the hyperactive battles later on, I felt as if I somehow ended up in a Pink Panther/Powerpuff Girls hybrid. The musical introductions to each chapter greatly enhanced this feeling.

Great tempo, fast action. Funny side characters (Sir Ponyheart: “Swift Justice!”)
And I always knew those llamas were up to no good, with their spitting and their deceptively lazy eyes…

The game does a whole lot of stuff on its own, often responding to a simple command with an entire sequence of actions. I like my parsers a bit more fine-grained.

While Anastasia is obviously super in every imaginable way (imagine a pony picking up a coconut!), in a game this short it wouldn’t have hurt to have the possibility of losing. Let the super pony take a beatdown, it’s an opportunity for a funny failure scene.

Fast, straightforward and funny. A quick pick-me-up. I liked it.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Action-packed superhero silliness, February 12, 2023
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

A Matter of Heist Urgency has an intriguing genre mash-up of being a heist and a brawler, and one where everyone's a horse. Some ponies, some llamas, some work as pirates while others are knights and superheroes. After some brief detective work to figure out who stole your city's crown jewels, you're off to a desert island to fight a scurvy crew of llamas.

The game's got a nice style with separate "parts," each headlined with some sequenced jazz music. You have a few fights to get through before the end, and the first pits you (and your partner) against a team of three. It introduces the battle mechanics well, where you're discouraged from using the same move against an enemy more than once. RNG determines whether your attacks hit and if you dodge the enemy, but it was generally skewed in my favor, so it felt fair.

There's a scene midway through that convinced me to give this game 4 stars instead of 3. It really impressed me, and it seems to be added in response to earlier reviewer feedback, so I want to highlight it here. Please play the game before reading this part! (Spoiler - click to show)It's a flashback to Anastasia's past as a rainbow factory worker, and how it got sabotaged by a llama. We also learn about her friend's death? I assumed that's what it was. The music score here is astounding, being perfectly timed with the text, growing in intensity as it goes on, and even having some beeping in time with the rainbow meter's explosion. It adds more backstory, it's fun to follow along with, and it's a great attention-grabber after the first battle.

For the pirate battle, there's action set pieces you can take advantage of (with a little thinking) to get rid of certain enemies, guaranteed. Running around the ship, solving puzzles before the llamas could catch up to me, was a surprisingly fast-paced and intense experience. Eventually, I just chose to fight them head-on. The third battle is done in choice format, but has some nice descriptions and visuals. Each one feels dynamic and serves a purpose, so it prevents the game from getting repetitive.

I think the short, punchy nature of this game works in its favor. The wild premise and bite-sized battles make it an easy choice to just jump into and enjoy. In that way, it's like the IF equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon. The IFDB page and in-game header say that Heist Urgency is the first in a series, and I'd easily play a sequel to this.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A brief action-packed pony parser game, February 7, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This is a parser game where the characters are all four-legged hooved creatures. It of course reminded me of My Little Pony, similar to the Daring Do episodes.

This game is unusual in that instead of focusing on traditional puzzles, it consists of primarily action sequences, outside of an initial investigation sequence.

The author says in the notes that the only way they could think of to make the fights interesting was to have multiple opponents. I have to say, I think it does help. I've played a lot of parser games with combat in them, and some of them are pretty great (like Gun Mute) but others suffer. I think the multiple opponents here help since it allows for strategy, like taking out the strongest one first or the one attacking your ally.

The implementation was actually pretty good. Something about the game as whole, though, felt just a tad thin, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it feels like there just could have been more, like using your powers more, more detail about you and your backstory, etc.

Edit: Since I wrote this, the game was updated with a cool little backstory if you are doing well after the first fight. It uses a technique that's very rare in parser games, and which would be annoying if overused, but is actually really cool here and helps fill in some of the gaps.

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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Reminder: Superhero Horse!, December 9, 2022
by JJ McC
Related reviews: IFComp 2022

Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review

When I initially wrote this, I had a feeling my review was going to say more about my age and cultural blind spots than I intended. I meant this in the least pejorative way possible: I read this as a serial-numbers-filed-off My Little Pony fanfic. It's not at all, so suspicion confirmed!

It is an adventure story in 3 parts, set in an indeterminate Renaissance-feeling time period. Notwithstanding the lack of opposable thumbs in the dominant sentient species, it is recognizably urbane and advanced. Also, there’s a super-hero horse? This thing is overtime on whimsy, and good for it. The story understands that whimsy is often best served by a snappy pace, but here it is somehow too rushed. You are whipped from one encounter/location to another without much pause. The whimsy of its setting is crying to be highlighted by examining surroundings. There are nods of it, like the brief overview of museum exhibits fit for the inhabitants, but they seem limited to the first part and almost completely disappear in parts 2-3. It could really use more. It is all too easy to forget you are a flying super-horse. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO FORGET THAT???

Part I is an investigation of the Heist in the title. While amusing, there is little to navigate, and barely more to examine before the case is cracked. There are two NPCs you can’t really interact with, which is fine. There is a technical glitch where one of the characters is always talking, and should you engage them, ends up talking both to you and not to you simultaneously. That could probably be fixed. There is some interaction no doubt but it feels very linear. Certainly the mystery is cracked at lightning speed and without much twist.

The next two parts are tracking down and battling the miscreants, in an apparant extended text-IF combat system showcase. Each part has its own setting, but the settings are 3-4 rooms max, with little to do but fight. It feels like the system has randomness involved, but I can’t tell for sure. While there were a few fighting options available, there didn’t seem to be any reason to do anything but strike, then up-arrow-enter repeatedly until done. The battle text was kind of amusing, but ultimately repetitive. The foes were Bond-villain thugs - each had their own signature flair, but were otherwise interchangeable. The game was at its most Mechanical here, and kind of washed away what charms part 1 offered.

This impression seems to be rooted in a, for me, large disconnect between expectations and gameplay. By invoking 'Heist,' I was immediately expecting convoluted planning, deception, reversals, grand set pieces. By invoking 'Superhero Horse' (SUPERHERO HORSE!!!) I was expecting lighthearted, whimsy-driven humor. A combat system showcase was so far from my expectations, I basically rejected it outright.

It felt like a missed opportunity to me. The star was the whimsical setting. I wanted so much more of that, and less fighting. Which, maybe as a review of a combat system is not so helpful. If you engage it as a combat system and resist being distracted by its intriguing chrome, maybe that would be a more rewarding path. But c'mon, why would you bury the lead? It should never be a surprise to remember I am a super hero horse.


Played: 10/20/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete

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

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Pony superhero jewel theft brawl-em-up, just go with it, November 28, 2022
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2022

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).

Friends, I have by now been around the block a little bit. I’ve been playing Comps since aught-two, on and off, and in that time I’ve lost count of the cryopods I’ve woken up in, the dragons I’ve run away from, the obfuscated allegories I’ve squinted at (the prepositions I’ve left dangling)…. But this is a new one on me: sure, you could say A Matter of Heist Urgency is a straightforward enough creature, a comedy parser game, on rails, where you foil the theft of the kingdom’s crown jewels from some evildoers.

But ye gods, the details: start with the title, for one thing, which sounds like it’s trying to be a pun but one I can’t for the life of me decode; then the world, which is a completely-unexplained off-brand My Little Pony thing (this isn’t actually My Little Pony, right?); and the protagonist, Anastasia the Power Pony, whose deal is likewise basically assumed and seems to be like a horse-person-superhero, maybe with a secret identity, since before investigating the theft you “disguise as Bess” (albeit when you arrive and X ME, you’re told “You, Anastasia the Power Pony, look just like you always do”). Once you show up at the scene of the crime, it only takes a few moments of looking around to find clues indicating that the culprits must be a band of evil llamas (this is starting to feel suspiciously speciest…) and you zoom off (you can fly) and soon find yourself in the first of three extended fight sequences that wrap up the game.

Per the ABOUT text, the game’s raison d’etre actually is to test out how to do action scenes in IF, so perhaps these oddities are just about the author wanting to get to said test-bed scenes as quickly as possible. But it’s still fairly disorienting stuff, all the more so since I dunno about you, but if I were trying to come up with a premise to justify some design experimentation around fight sequences, “superhero horse jewel theft” isn’t even the 23rd one I’d come up with.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though! The off-kilter plot elements help keep the game from feeling too dry, and it’s game’s designed so you don’t really need to know much about what’s going on to make progress. Indeed, even just speaking mechanically each set piece works pretty well on its own terms. The initial investigation scene just involves typing X [SCENERY ITEM] a couple times before it automatically ends, but the game does a good job keeping track of which clues you’ve found and making the order seem natural regardless of where you start looking.

The first of the fight scenes is a little dull, admittedly – you just type ATTACK [TARGET] until you’ve worn down your three assailants, as best I can tell, with the RNG deciding whether you hit, or are hit in turn. But the remaining two mix things up in fun ways, with the second allowing you to use the environment on a pirate ship to take out mooks with a single action, and the third implementing a choice-based approach to fisticuffs for the “boss fight” that bottom-lines things just as the action is starting to wear thin. Then you get an ending – there are a couple of choices here, plus a ranking based on how efficiently you won the first fight – and that’s your lot, probably having never caught your breath or having twigged to what the heck is meant to be going on.

The game styles itself “An Anastasia the Power Pony Adventure” – though it’s the first of its kind, that subtitle seems to indicate there might be more to come. Hopefully future installments wouldn’t be quite so monomaniacally fighty, but despite my confusion I had fun with this pacy, silly game that doesn’t wear out its welcome – so I’d be down for a second installment, though I’d hope for a flashback to Anastasia’s secret origin or something so someone could explain exactly what is everybody’s deal.

EDIT: Wait, I think I got the title – it’s a pun where you pronounce “heist” like “highest”, so “a matter of highest urgency”. But that’s not at all how I'd pronounce that word! I repeat, this game is kind of zany.

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- EJ, November 21, 2022

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022

- OverThinking, November 16, 2022

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022

- Brad Buchanan (Seattle, Washington), November 13, 2022

- Vivienne Dunstan (Dundee, Scotland), November 11, 2022

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Saturday Morning Superhero Action, November 5, 2022

A Matter of Heist Urgency bills itself as “An Anastasia the Power Pony Story”, although as best I can tell this is the only “Anastasia the Power Pony” story in existence right now. The game certainly doesn’t seem to acknowledge this, as it throws you right into the action, but it’s not hard to piece together what’s going on – you’re Anastasia, a pony superhero fighting crime in a world of ungulates. In true Saturday morning cartoon style, you have to investigate a crime (without blowing your secret identity, of course), and then jet off and use your powers to fight the culprits with (or more accurately, despite) the help of the gallantly useless detective Sir Ponyheart.

What I Liked

The story and staging here have a lot of heart. The pony characters are memorable, and overall it really feels like a 90s superhero cartoon. I would have absolutely loved an Anastasia action figure as a kid.

What I Didn’t

This game is full of great ideas that aren’t translated well to a game. Yes, it’s a shorter parser game, but there’s really no puzzles to be found. You examine some things in the first scene, then it’s off to find the llamas and make your way through some fight scenes as Anastasia. At least one potential puzzle is solved by Anastasia doing a number of actions when commanded to SNEAK that could have been several separate commands. The fight scenes were similarly unchallenging and while there’s some depth to them, I also managed to win them all by spamming the same command over and over. Maybe the hint command will give more insight, but I’m not generally a fan of using it to convey required gameplay knowledge. This is a place where I really could have used a basic list of available commands, since otherwise I feel like the game expects the player to be familiar with Anastasia’s power set – but there’s still no other Power Pony games to be found, so guess the verb it is. Overall this felt like watching a cartoon, with watching being the key word.

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- jaclynhyde, October 19, 2022


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