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.

Although Scroll Thief is said to be an unofficial sequel to some famous Infocom games, any unfamiliarity with those should not deter anyone from playing Scroll Thief. At least it did not me, and I’m all the happier for it.

Most of the game deals with understanding and using spells to obtain more spells, and this was at times deviously tricky. The back story sustains the puzzles perfectly and is capturing enough to fuel a puzzled puzzler forward. A particularly impressive point of note is that Scroll Thief contains some really new (for me at least) and interesting way of interacting with NPC’s.

When first starting the game and reading about how to do all the magic stuff, I was afraid that it would be a bit overwhelming and/or tedious with all the copying and preparing and scrying and whatnot, but this was actually much easier than my first impressions implied. It turned out these things were automagically simplified for the player.

There were a few things I found confusing, however. Scroll Thief is listed as polite on the cruelty scale, but seeing this actually prevented me from progressing in the beginning; the proper way to move forward gives the same warning as one that (presumably) would prevent the player from winning. Also, several puzzles have multiple solutions, which I generally condone, but here, for me, these ended up as red herrings that took me a lot of time to unsuccessfully figure out.

The second act of the game went much smoother, and having learned how to best utilize the magic at my disposal it was simply pure fun. Then it suddenly ended.