External Links
- aayela.gam
Post-competition release (2001).
Or download aayela.gam and run the game in a TADS interpreter. - aayela.gam
as entered in 1996 competition
Or download aayela.gam and run the game in a TADS interpreter.
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About the Story
In the forty-seventh year of the reign of King Dargon, twelve years after the battle of Cyr-Dhool, and five years after his third marriage, disaster struck the Realm.
Queen Dahra became ill; at first just a cold, but the fever rose and she became delirious; then she fell into a coma. King Dargon, never much of a ruler, seemed to lose all sense of the world outside, spending all his time watching over his young wife.
When old Grodrig, the court magician, first mentioned the Stone of Aayela, the courtiers just laughed at him. A myth, an old fairytale - how could he talk such nonsense? But he kept retelling what he had read in his dusty old tomes: how Heliax the Wizard had captured a spirit of light, Aayela, in a perfect crystal, bending her power to his will; how the Stone lay hidden, deep below the roots of the mountains, waiting for a hero to retrieve it.
Perhaps the Stone was the only cure for her illness? Finally the King himself, in one of his few lucid moments, decreed that the stone was to be found and brought back. As the youngest and most dispensable of the King's knights, you are the natural choice for a fool's errand like this.
Awards
Nominee, Best Writing - 1996 XYZZY Awards
10th Place - 2nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (1996)
Ratings and Reviews
| Average Rating:    Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 2 |
In Aayela, you play a young and expendable knight off to find the magical stone that will cure the queen's illness. This story is mostly an excuse to get you into a cave, where the game's main gimmick quickly becomes apparent: your lamp goes out, and most of the game is spent in darkness.
Exploring a cave in the dark could be very interesting, but Aayela fails to do its premise justice: not only is the cave exceedingly small, but there is in fact little difference between this game and a game where you explore a cave with light. You do not have to guess the identity of objects from their form, smell, taste or sound -- feeling something will always identify it for you. From the point of view of the player, typing "examine" and typing "feel" is not much of a difference. You do have to discover some things by feeling around, but these quasi-puzzles are familiar from other games where you have to feel under or in things.
What remains is an enjoyable little tale with different endings depending on a choice the character can make at the end. Olsson writes good, if perhaps somewhat overblown, prose, and the final scene is much more memorable than the cave itself. So, as a snack sized diversion, Aayela is certainly worth playing; but much more could have been done with it.
This is a shortish game with the almost unique trick of placing a lot of gameplay in darkness in a cave. The only similar game I can think of is Hunter in Darkness or parts of So Far.
You are searching for a magical crystal in an underground cavern. The rest of the story is mainly atmosphere, and it works well. This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best writing, and deserves it.
Overall, a short, simple game, with at least 3 endings depending on your final actions.
Recommended for its fun-to-length ratio.
3 Off-Site Reviews
Baf's Guide
An interesting experiment in the presentation of darkness. To save your kingdom, you must find the legendary Stone of Aayela (a crystal that imprisons a powerful spirit of light) by exploring the dark cave where it lies by sense of touch and sound. A small game that exposes some of the untapped potential of the medium.
-- Carl Muckenhoupt
SPAG
[...] The atmosphere created by spending most of the adventure in the dark is moderately effective, but the use of other senses is too limited to do the situation justice. [...] (John Wood)
[...] I liked "Aayela," don't get me wrong. I simply didn't find it as clever as Magnus' previous work, particularly when compared with so many other outstanding entries this year. (C.E. Forman)
See the full review
>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
My main memory of Aayela was that crawling in dark is an interesting device which could make for an intense episode in a longer game (and, in fact, already has in the case of So Far.) As the bulk of this game, it made for an interesting experiment.
See the full review
Tags
Game Details
Current Version: 1.2
License: Freeware
Development System: TADS 2
Baf's Guide ID: 8
| IFIDs: | TADS2-E8F3E3E1FA610AE139A044D7863143CC |
| TADS2-CDE6855B4B8927998D311E372B07D86E |
If you enjoyed Aayela...
Related Games
Other members recommend this game for people who like Aayela:Hunter, in Darkness, by Andrew Plotkin
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Recommended Lists
Aayela appears in the following Recommended Lists:Favorite "atmosphere" games by MathBrush
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Polls
The following polls include votes for Aayela:Games Where Moving In The Dark Is Essential by Canalboy
As a compulsive map maker I recently came across two games where you have to know your location exactly as you need to move in complete darkness. This set me wondering about how many games feature this particular conundrum.
Solved without Hints by joncgoodwin
I'm very interested in hearing truthful accounts of at least somewhat difficult games (or games that don't solve themselves at least) solved completely without recourse to hints, walkthroughs, etc.
Games with Impossible-to-film moments by aaronius
I'm looking for games that demonstrate the power of text-based games. Games with sentences that would make developers of 3D games weep, like "The army of ten million robots marched over the liquid landscape," or "She concealed her anger...
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