Alyas of Starhollow

This is a very large game, with a lot of puzzles. But none of the puzzles felt especially cool. The game felt to me like an affordable all-you-can-eat buffet, where you can eat your fill of decent but unmemorable food.

Most of my feedback here is negative; I think I'd give it four stars if issues like the ones below were fixed.

Searching and looking under everything is painfully dull

The game begins with this "note for the player":

This adventure game is very much "old school" in that the gameplay involves having to SEARCH objects and/or LOOK BEHIND, IN or UNDER objects to find objects that you will need during the game. You might also have to EXAMINE WALL to find something on it. The game is also quite long and there is the possibility of sudden death. There is also some mild adult content.

If you do not like this style of adventure gameplay then regrettably this game may not be for you.

I don't think it's right to characterize this approach to SEARCH as "old school." None of the Zork games use the verb SEARCH. A few Infocom games like Ballyhoo support SEARCH as an alternate way to LOOK IN something that's obviously a container, but you never need to SEARCH stuff to find something hidden.

I generally object to SEARCH as a "puzzle" mechanic because it's inherently boring. Most parser games already require you to exhaustively EXAMINE every notable thing in every room. In games that require SEARCH, there's usually no clue/hint about what you need to search, so you just have to SEARCH everything after you've EXAMINEd it. What's the point?

I've said elsewhere that, in my opinion, a good puzzle solution should be surprising but inevitable in hindsight. Ideally, I won't immediately see the solution to the puzzle, but once I figure out the solution, I'll slap my forehead and say "ah, I should have known!" SEARCH puzzles are never like that. Once I know that the solution is to SEARCH every notable object, finding something when I SEARCH is never surprising or delightful.

But this game makes it that much worse, because you don't just have to SEARCH everything. You also have to LOOK UNDER and LOOK IN things, when SEARCH should have accomplished that.

In Longhouse
You are in the village longhouse, where the people of Starhollow gather for socialising. There are lots of tables, chairs and benches for people to sit on. Double doors lead Out to the lane outside and the kitchen is to the West.

> x tables
What villagers sit at when eating meals or playing games, etc. On one of the tables you see some food.

> search tables
You search the tables but find nothing of interest.

> look under tables
You look under one of the tables and find a length of thin rope, which you pick up.

You can't get out of the starting village of Starhollow without finding a bunch of mandatory items this way. It makes interacting with the game feel like a huge slog. Every time you see a thing, you must first EXAMINE it, then SEARCH it, then LOOK IN/LOOK UNDER it, over and over and over. When I got stuck, it usually turned out that there was something I'd remembered to SEARCH but forgotten to also LOOK at using the right preposition.

The sex scene is not for everybody (perhaps hardly anybody)

About 60% of the way through the game, you'll encounter a mermaid, silently beckoning to you as she swims underwater. You can't follow her at first; you have to solve a puzzle to get to her underwater grotto.

When you get to her grotto, she gives you an important quest item. Then, she magically turns her tail into legs, and immediately and automatically has sex with you, in a "fade to black" sex scene with no detail or interactivity.

I don't think this level of adult content will please anybody.

I think many players will be turned off by automatically having sex with a mermaid we just met, without even a "(y/n)" question to decide whether to participate.

Players who do find this sexual encounter rewarding will prefer more explicit detail. Adult IF is a thing people enjoy; if you want to write it, then write it. But a "fade to black" sex scene that starts by surprise and ends on a single, non-interactive page is, I claim, nobody's cup of tea.

Even the bit of detail we get about this scene only characterizes the mermaid as an object of sexual desire. Is Alyas sexy? If so, the game has literally nothing to say about that. If you're not into having sex with women, there is nothing for you here.

I think the author intended this scene to be a "reward" to the player for playing this far, but I found it unrewarding. Anyone who wants romance in their AIF, anyone who wants explicit detail in their AIF, anyone who wants interactivity in their AIF, and anyone who's not into sex with women will be unrewarded.

Cruel, perhaps accidentally

The game has hundreds of rooms; the map is divided into zones. Progressing to the next "zone" is normally the primary objective in each area.

Leaving the first zone, the village of Starhollow, the game's narrator intervenes, refusing to let you leave unless you have all of the mandatory items. ("There's something that was in your yort that you haven't got.")

But the game will cheerfully let you forget to bring objects from the very next zone. You can just miss the ball of string, hop on a ferry to the far side of the lake, and you'll be completely stuck, unable to finish the game, and unable to figure out why you can't finish the game.

This is so "cruel" in the Zarfian Cruelty Scale that I think it may have been a bug. If the narrator had said "There's something in the woods that you haven't got" when trying to board the ferry, that would have made the game much better.

I have been married for going on eleven years now, and in that time my wife and I have developed our own little habits for certain things. For example, here’s how we celebrate our anniversaries: each year, without fail, we’ll decide what day we want to go out and do something, then I’ll do some research to come up with two or three options that I think would be fun or romantic, present them to my wife, who’ll deliberate for a couple of minutes before making a pick – and then each year, a day or two later, she’ll tell me that she did a little bit of her own digging and came up with an idea that is obviously and objectively way, way better than what I came up with, so we do that instead. Unsurprisingly, that means that over the years, even as we’ve stuck to the exact same formalities, the amount of effort I put into coming up with those initial choices has ratcheted down, because even though part of me has to believe that it’s meaningful effort, the greater part of me knows that it’s really just putting on a show before the inevitable happens.

I’ve got something of the same learned helplessness when it comes to Larry Horsfield’s old-school ADRIFT parser puzzlers (yes, that’s the kind of segue you can only get from a Mike Russo review, at least for another two or three generations of LLMs). Every time I read the preview, get excited at the idea of testing my wits against a long, fiendishly-tricky fantasy adventure, read through the extensive instructions and pre-game material while psyching myself up for the challenge, explore the opening area and pat myself on the back for successfully deploying a LOOK BEHIND or LOOK UNDER or two – then get stuck, realize there are no hints, allow my low-level social anxiety to prevent me from taking the author up on the invitation to email them for the walkthrough, and quit in shame. Once or twice, with especially short and easy games, I’ve managed to break the pattern and make substantial progress or even win the thing, but friends, I think this was my worst showing yet, akin to asking my wife if she wants to just spend our anniversary at the second-closest McDonalds (it’s marginally nicer than the closest one!)

I’m disappointed, since until I hit a brick wall I was having a good time. The inciting incident is ridiculous – the village elder sends your village into high alert because someone has stolen the pipe of the evil warlock Rummikum Rummkub, and dragoons you into a quest to recover it – but the other villagers also think it’s a bit much, and there’s a similar amount of just-getting-on-with-it charm to the game’s extremely white-bread fantasy world. Sure, it’s a mismash, with the village boasting a longhouse, a roundhouse, a yort (sic?), and a church complete with stained glass and a nave, but the matter-of-fact prose and just-detailed-enough implementation successfully evoke a classic adventuring vibe. And it was satisfying to run around gathering supplies for the adventure, finding food and water, retrieving your dagger, and so on – that kind of low-key grounding makes the grand fantasy bits stand out all the more.

I never actually got to any of those grand fantasy bits, though, since when I tried to leave the village in pursuit of the thief, an out of character voice told me I needed something from the church. That’s a better approach than letting the player get into a walking dead state, I suppose, but the problem was there was no in-game reason why I would expect there to be anything hidden in the church, nor any clue as to what I was supposed to do there – I messed around with the pews, fumbled around with some carved decorations, tried to steal the god’s statue from the altar (at some point my score went from 10/650 to 5/650, and in retrospect this might have been where I made my blunder), and admitted defeat some 15 minutes later.

Before fully giving up on the game, I made a half-hearted attempt at the other puzzle I was aware of, prompted by reading a book indicating that I’d need some ashes in case I ran into a giant spider later (it’s somehow supposed to confuse them). I’d found a dirty fireplace but couldn’t get a container to scrape the ash into. The miller at the edge of town has a giant pile of empty sacks, which seemed promising, but he wouldn’t let me borrow one or even try to buy one, and realizing that I couldn’t swap gold for an empty burlap sack made me realize that progress in this game was going to depend more on lawnmowering through the command list than thinking up reasonable solutions to obstacles, and I just couldn’t muster up the requisite enthusiasm, since I was sure that even if I did eventually figure these two puzzles out, I’d inevitably come a cropper on some future challenge. Farewell, Alyas of Star – sorry, ALYAS OF STARHALLOW, we barely knew ye, you put in a lot of effort and I barely made any, but that’s just the pattern we’ve settled into after all these years.

UPDATE: Upon getting a in-retrospect-kinda-obvious-though-still-unmotivated hint from the author in the thread below, I was able to get through my ecclesiastical blockage, and after some comedic back and forth where I was prevented from venturing forth on my grand adventure until I’d secured that most critical piece of a hero’s equipage, a tea towel, finally made it to the game proper. I actually started making some solid progress, working through some solidly-clued puzzles to get rid of a pack of wild dogs, explore a deserted village, and uncover some secrets hidden in an enchanted forest. Then I ran out of steam trying to get down from a hundreds-of-feet-high escarpment – I’m worried I might have released a genie too early – but still, with a respectable 150/650 points, and having enjoyed some solid adventure-gaming, I’m much more satisfied both with myself and with the game than I was yesterday.

It's very tough to give a rating here, so I won't- especially because I beta tested.

Alyas of Starhollow goes to great lengths not just to capture the feel of traditional/cassette fantasy IF, but to get the writing style, story structure, and even puzzle design right. In this it is a wholesale success and I can't fault it. It goes right down to having to press seemingly arbitrary letters on the title screen to start the game.

I love this, but it means one ends up with many splinters from the rough edges while playing. And yet even as I write that, it seems unfair. These rough edges are lovingly carved. This is a title that expects the player to go to some trial-and-error, to experiment heavily through timed sections, to guess and explore and reload and reload and refine. There are instances of guess-the-verb and a few of guess-the-noun but nothing counterintuitive- everything always makes sense in hindsight.

The descriptive writing is appropriately austere, and I find it effective, overall.

Let me put it this way. Give this one a try - and if you make it out of the village without too much frustration, press on.