All That Shimmers...

Maybe it’s because I played All That Shimmers… hot (er) on the heels of Lewd Mod: No Butts, but the thing my brain keeps coming back to is that the witch is a babe. The game makes no bones about the fact that this woman who’s recently arrived in your town is up to no good – in fact she’s casting a spell to obtain world domination, so the business of the game is thwarting her – but even from the first time she’s mentioned, it’s emphasized that she’s a young witch, not one of those shriveled-up hags. When you finally track her down in her lair, all the cauldron-stirring has left her “quite hot and bothered”, and sure enough, tempting fate by hanging around long enough to tempt fate by examining her confirms that “you find her surprisingly attractive.” Heck, if you do manage to annoy her she zaps you with a spell, and the game-over text laments “this witch really was evil”, the protagonist seemingly as sad to not get a date as at the prospect of spending the rest of his life shapechanged into a duck.

The mystical femme fatale is of course an ancient archetype – paging Morgan Le Fay – but what’s distinctive about this whole setup is that (spoiler) the witch isn’t just a buxom co-ed trying on the dark arts for a lark: turns out she’s really a frog who was shapeshifted into her human form by a fellow witch. This is quite the twist, and raises questions like 1) wait, did the other witch cast a spell specifically to turn the frog into a hottie?; 2) have we been cheated of a prequel telling how these cross-species lesbian enchantresses tracked down the spell of doom that acts as a MacGuffin in this game; and 3) how dire is the protagonist’s dating life that, upon finding out that the lady he’s been lusting after is an amphibian, he doesn’t have the slightest reaction?

The other reason I’m hung up on this detail is that All That Shimmers… is the kind of debut any first-time author should be proud of: it’s of a manageable scope, with a straightforward plot well-suited to parser IF, with puzzles that don’t strain the basic action affordances of PunyInform but are well-implemented with a Goldilocks level of clueing, and plentiful dad jokes that mostly land. That means my review notes are basically just a list of things I enjoyed – groaning at the Garfield and Father Brown references, admiring the restraint in not spelling out the punch-line to the gag about the dog’s name, or pointing out the coincidence that there’s a puzzle here that’s exactly the same as one in ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, which I'd just played. It’s like listening to a jazz band play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star – you know exactly where the melody is going, so it’s all about the grace notes and the vamping, the way they put their own spin on an old, old formula.

And yeah, one part of that spin is the sexy frog lady, but there’s also the fact that you get the call to adventure twice, once in passive form when you read a newspaper article about the witch being up to no good, then again when the ghost of your grandmother shows up to order you to do something about this (if the witch has something to do with the dead rising, the game doesn’t feel bothered to explain the connection). While some of the puzzles are as straightforward as giving an old coin to the lady who’s reading a coin-collecting magazine, there are a couple that rely on logical but non-obvious actions, which makes for a pleasantly-paced set of challenges. And the jokes really did make me smile, like this one poking fun at the awkwardness inherent in some parser conventions:

"To the west you see the enticing foliage of the local park, and opposite the park is the local shop. To the north is the local church, and following the street south will lead to even more local stuff belonging to this locality."

All That Shimmers… is emphatically not a game that breaks the mold or does something ground-breaking or unique with its format; it’s not going to generate heated debate or in-depth craft discussions. But it’s a very solid and entertaining example of its genre, and a heck of a debut. If the author does decide to try something more adventurous for a sophomore outing, I’d definitely be excited to play it – but more of the same sure seems like it would be perfectly enjoyable, too.