Scroll Thief

Scroll Thief was an Introcomp game that was received well and is now finished. In this game, you are a student who is trying to steal some magic as you deal with the events occurring in the game Spellbreaker.

The game is split into two parts, Act I and Act II. In Act I, you are searching a magical library for enough spells to make it worth your while. As you do so, you begin to get the sense of a larger storyline, and Act II ties into this.

Act I plays out almost like a large escape-the-room puzzle, like Suveh Nux. You are mostly on your own, investigating a variety of enchantments and magical objects, and tinkering with them until you are ready to leave.

I preferred Act II, which reminded me more of the original Enchanter games. You are tasked with discovering more about a mysterious and threatening situation, and you enter some darker and more dangerous regions. It is a bit shorter than Act I, which keeps the game from dragging.

Overall, the game is well-polished, with many testers listed and no errors I found. I had trouble finding topics to discuss with the NPCs, but I may just have tried the wrong topics. The game has implemented some unusual things with difficult-to-code objects and situations (involving long-distance communication and rope, among other things).

The game references Enchanter a lot, but you should be able to play without any previous knowledge of Enchanter (I recall that I was able to play Balances, a small game in the same world, without having played Enchanter). The author also includes references to his testers and Club Floyd players, which I think is nice.

The hints are progressive-style, and purposely don't tell you everything. So even with the hints, you have to make some small leaps of intuition. I enjoyed that, as I play most games with the walkthrough from the get-go, and it was nice to experience those jumps again.

Overall, I recommend it, and strongly recommend it to fans of the Enchanter trilogy.