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

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