Moondrop Isle

Moondrop Isle is nine games stitched into one. Ryan Veeder, hosting The Third Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition in his official capacity as Ryan Veeder, has invited eight collaborators to contribute to a huge puzzle game set in an abandoned holiday resort, each author writing their own area. Each area is its own game file; some technical wrangling by Nils Fagerburg tracks information such as your inventory and what doors you've unlocked so that your game state carries over from one area-game to the next. This allows you to walk from an Inform project to a TADS project to a Twine file. It's genuinely very exciting.

The isle itself is gigantic. I make it about 330 distinct rooms, but can't confirm because it's so big my Trizbort map refuses to bring up the map statistics. Exploration is unfocused at first - room descriptions draw your attention to the isle's central Hotel within the first few moves, but it can take a long time before you discover a way to get there, never mind getting inside. But the process of exploration and mapping itself is fun, because each author brings their own voice, style and experiments to their own areas. Carl Muckenhoupt's Shore is sprawling but peaceful, easing you into the game but hiding more than a few secrets; Joey Jones' Lunarcade and Jason Love's Moonlight Meadow recreation centre are complicated puzzle boxes with plenty of verticality; Caleb Wilson's Tunnels are twisty and atmospheric and eerie. Even the gameplay can change from author to author; most areas are parser-based but Fagerburg's Endymion Gardens limits the parser and Mark Marino's Fortune Teller area is something completely different (and one of the great technical achievements of Moondrop Isle in its own right).

It risks feeling chaotic, but the wider geography of the isle feels right. The areas are unified by the inventory shared between them all - every major puzzle-solving item will have uses all over the isle. There are also a few ongoing plot threads scattered across areas, usually not vital but fun to spot, which help Moondrop Isle feel more like a place where people played and worked.

The puzzle quality is impressively high between all the authors. Standout puzzles include the devious kiosks that appear in Muckenhoupt's Shore in the mid-game ((Spoiler - click to show)which struck fear in my heart when I realised those puzzles from The Fool's Errand were back to haunt me), Sarah Willson's Obra-Dinn-in-miniature storage locker logic puzzle in the Hotel, the scavenger hunts spread across Zach Hodgens' Gibbous Grove mall (which is a delight to explore, by the way), and the absurd overload of information in the centrepiece puzzle of Veeder's own contribution. The difficulty is generally genial with a few toughies, but those toughies often have easier alternative solutions - Love has been especially kind about this with the intricate puzzles in Moonlight Meadow, which are worth a go but which can be mercifully simplified. That said, it can trip you up if you spend ages trying to figure out a puzzle which turns out to let you into an area which you already accessed via a back door.

Implementation can be a little spotty in the most complex areas, but the technical structure of the game means that bugfixes can be pushed without breaking saves (theoretically), so those aren't too worrying. However, I would have liked more consistency in how verbs are handled between the different games. This is most obvious with the meta-verbs - commands like "help" or "exits" give hints in some areas and do nothing at all in others, which can be a nasty surprise if you're using these to get your bearings in a new area. This is a bigger problem with important objects where certain verb constructions are necessary in some areas but unimplemented in others, which could be very unfair to players who try the correct phrasing in the wrong area and think it won't work. (I'm especially thinking of a late-game object, the decoder scope - the full command LOOK AT SOMETHING THROUGH SCOPE is required sometimes, but only sometimes, so that if you get used to the more common LOOK THROUGH SCOPE, you might be tricked into thinking it doesn't have a use in certain places.)

Did I mention the guinea pigs? There's like 20 guinea pigs roaming the island, and they can walk between game files which is unbelievable in itself, and you can name them and the different games remember what you named them. Should I have led with that? That might be the #1 reason to play Moondrop Isle.