An Account of Your Visit to the Enchanted House & What You Found There

This was a cute game, written in Twine with lots of exploration and some puzzles.

You are given an invitation to a beautiful and magical house filled with enchanted objects and creatures. Almost everything has positive and wholesome undertones, although there are some disruptive or angry behaviors.

The house is full of animated things, like skulls or piles of clothes. Everything you meet has requests, from helping deal with a friend to basic needs like food. The puzzles have variety; even though the map is compact (with only 4 big locations and 2 smaller connecting rooms) the number of different tasks you can do and secrets you can find is surprising. New links pop up in one area based on actions in others, and there is some searching (like a big library bookshelf).

I think I liked the bedroom the best, because it had a combination of creepy and fun, or negative and positive emotions.

At times I wished for a little higher stakes, but the ending resonated with me emotionally. Similarly a few too many of the puzzles involved mechanical searching through a list of things, but at least the writing was interesting in each item and the other puzzles had more variety.

Overall, definitely a fun game to play. The reason I like playing IFComp games more than a lot of other IF is that you can tell the IFComp games have a lot of work put into them and were carefully nurtured and worked on until they’re a real gem. The love put into this game is reflected in its quality.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

This is the latest of the hoary old ‘mysterious invite to spooky house’ setup. If you are asking, ‘how many of these can we be expected to encounter across the run of IF history?’ my answer is ‘as many as it takes to encounter THIS one.’ With point-select works, the fun is a very precarious balance between ‘lawn mowering’ link combinations to make progress your brain can’t find, and a mechanical exercise of following a trail of links with no uncertainty or frisson in their construction. If my own sampling can be considered statistically valid, far more fail in one direction or another than succeed.

I am tempted to take you on a faux-discovery journey as I pretend to explore how this one succeeds when others do not. Both as a click-select adventure AND as the latest trotting out of this staid old warhorse setup. I could propose disingenuous theory after disingenuous theory, engage them with pie-eyed dishonesty before sadly concluding, ‘no that doesn’t quite explain it.’ All before revealing with performative wonder the BIG SECRET of the work. I could do all that, but the truth is, it’s pretty obvious EXACTLY why this one succeeds.

Its writing and NPCs are delightful.

That’s really it, the BIG SECRET. Yes, it is pretty good at balancing clear-but-not-crystal clear progress paths and clues. Yes, you might need to do some conversational lawn mowering, but the work rewards you with fun anecdotes and business so you don’t feel the time is wasted. Yes, the overarching setup and final plot beats are pretty bog-standard. But everything in between is just a joy to marinate in. Goofy, funny, inventive, wacky and fun. Even the language of the thing is endlessly playful. This is a work that uses the word ‘perspicacity’ correctly, but also delves into slime humor. I captured so many lovely images and bizarre turns of phrase and decided this one best summed up how on-my-vibe this piece is: “the mundane atticly ephemera of a lifetime” A work that gleefully makes up nonsense words side-by-side with multi-syllable jawbreakers is my art-work from another mother.

Everything about midgame was a joy to work with, from the moon logic puzzles that flow naturally from setup, to the zany cast, to the environment descriptions of its tight geography. Not only are the NPCs well conceived, sharply characterized, gifted with their own senses of humor (and pettiness), they also track state VERY well for this sort of thing, and engage (or don’t) you exactly as events would have you expect. Just not necessarily the WAY you would expect. Equal parts gleefully surprising and rigorously internally consistent.

It doesn’t quite achieve technical seamlessness, there are a few state issues. In one case, a teddy bear you moved continues to be present in its initial location. But these issues are vanishingly small in number, and further reduced by all the good will the rest of the package generates. The prose is almost immediately and pervasively Engaging. (Quick shout out to the sound design, which provides a great baseline atmosphere for the thing. Cuts out an aural space for you to play in, away from the cold logic of the world around you. That has no place here.)

So all you IF authors laboring painstakingly in a finely tuned code base to wring nuanced puzzle play out of cold algorithms: forget all that stuff! Just write really well and delight your player/readers! What could be simpler?

Played: 9/7/24
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again: No, experience feels complete

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

Among my bad habits is my tendency, upon first visiting the house of an acquaintance, to ignore my host and make a beeline for the bookshelves to see what’s on offer. Of course I’m even less restrained when no actual people are involved, so I love nothing more than to look at book after book in a game’s library, the author’s dedication typically wearing out well before my interest wanes (er, my incomplete exploration of Forbidden Lore’s obfuscated stacks notwithstanding). So believe me when I say that I think An Account of Your Visit… gave me the most pleasure I’ve ever derived from an IF book-browse.

First off, the shelf in question is depicted in delightful ASCII art; there are fat books and thin books, interchangeable ones and unique ones, volumes lined up ramrod-straight and others tilted at a careless angle, making for an aesthetically pleasing invitation to click on all the titles to see what they are. And oh, what a smorgasbord! There are creepy classics like Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with older antecedents like Machen and Dunsany, but by no means is this a hair-raising collection or even one restricted to real-world texts: there are books by Threepwood comma Guybrush as well as Threepwood comma Clarence, a deep-cut Quest for Glory reference in Healing Herbs by Erana, and to top it all off, you can even find the Joy of Cooking (well, a Joy, it’s got some recipes Julia Child never contemplated).

I don’t mention this admirable collation just for its own sake, though, but because it’s also something of a synecdoche for the game as a whole. While the framing is pure haunted-house – you get an invitation from a mysterious benefactor who’s mysteriously absent once you roll up to the eponymous manor, and of course no sooner has the door locked behind you than you’re waylaid by a talking cat, with a lively skull just one room over – the vibe is far more cozy than horrific, with characters like the fussy librarian Basil Fink-Nottle explicitly invoking Wodehouse and easygoing puzzles that would be at home in one of the friendlier 90s point-and-click adventures.

The game’s older-school inspirations are also visible in how it motivates the player – or rather, how it doesn’t; you don’t have any particular agenda in mind when you arrive and it takes a while for broader objectives to become clear. So at first you pretty much need to explore the house just because it’s the only thing to do. Fortunately, the gregarious characters and sprightly prose are all the draw I needed. The writing is peppered with risky but ultimately successful imagery, like the description of the driver who drops you off as a man “whose drawn down features bear the characteristics of wilting lettuce”, or saying of the building that “[i]t stretches toward the sky unevenly, like a cat arching its shoulders - cordial, but cautious.” And the already-fun cast I mentioned above is shortly joined by an adorable octopus, a raucous gang of furniture, and a raven, who seems to be the only one taking the proceedings even slightly seriously.

All of them, of course, either have something you need or are standing in your way until you’ve procured something they want. The main business of the game is thus just the standard IF loop of going to a new room, rifling through all the scenery, exhausting the conversation topics, and then moving to the next room to do it again, until you hit the limits of where you can explore and loop back to see what the knowledge and/or items you’ve gained in the meantime will unlock.

Structurally, An Account… is a parser-like choice game, but a very streamlined one. There’s an inventory but you rarely have more than four or five objects at a time, and almost always all you need to do with them is give them to somebody. The game also helpfully eliminates already-clicked options when you’ve exhausted them, which is a nice convenience but also means that revisiting locations to see if there’s anything new to do is a very quick and easy process. The result is a quick-playing game whose puzzles more or less solve themselves – it’s the kind of system ill-informed critics have in mind when they say you can’t do hard puzzles in Twine. They’re of course wrong about that – witness the work of Abigail Corfman and Agnieszka Trzaska, among many others – but also, sometimes easy and amusing fetch-quests perfectly fit a game’s vibe, as is the case here, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

There is a serious note introduced towards the end, as well as some long-deferred answers as to what exactly is going on, but the author avoids treacle and schmaltz. It helps that underneath their surface wackiness, the supporting characters are all loveable in their own way, and the literary antecedents the game isn’t shy about invoking primed me to look for some heart under the light comedy. It’s not an emotionally-effecting climax by any means, but it winds up tying a neat bow around the experience, adding just enough depth to make the hijinx stick in the memory. Sure, this is a game that’s content not to innovate and wear its inspirations on its sleeve, but it picks good inspirations, and integrates them with an impressive deftness of touch, like a jumble of exciting, enticing books crammed into an IKEA Expedit. I repeat: nothing wrong with any of that.