Bael's Rock: A Text Adventure

The Stranger left you in the Desert. Across the Chasm is a Mountain. In the Mountain is a Cave.

Bael's Rock presents the player with an interesting mix of a traditional cave-crawl and a mystery driven storyline.

All the action takes place underground, in a series of obstacle-loaded caverns and chambers. While the descriptions of these locations do convey a sense of mood and aesthetic, they are mostly (necessarily) focused on clear depiction of the contents of the room. The chambers are relatively small and self-contained puzzle-areas, each an escape-room of sorts unto itself. This means that the large-scale exploration and map-drawing aspect that normally accompanies large cave-adventures is not present here. Once a room is solved, the protagonist moves to the next location of interest without guidance from the player.

This design means that the free exploration (and map-drawing) itch I so love to scratch is absent from the game. And I have to admit that I missed it a bit; an adventure in mysterious cave-system seems to demand elaborate investigation of multiple crawlspaces and looping pathways, and the intricate mapping that goes along with it. Soon however, I was won over by how the author manages to exploit the advantages of the modular design.
First, the subdivision of the larger game-world into bite-sized mini-maps makes it easy to focus on the task at hand. As far as I could tell, the separate areas are self-contained, so 'when confronted with a new obstacle, I knew that everything I needed was right in the room with me. I just had to figure out how to use the items and the information at hand. (A bit reminiscent of Eric the Unready's design.)
Second, taking the movement between puzzle-areas out of the player's hands gives the author freedom to narrate the journey. The elaborate cutscenes between locations are great for expanding on the protagonist's struggle and for impressing the depth and gloominess of the cave on the player. Without the need for mentioning exits and objects, the text in these journey-descriptions can give a broader impression of the surroundings and the PC's travels through them.

Each sub-map is a sort of escape-room challenge with one large puzzle. About half the puzzles are quite traditional adventure fare: a bit of lock-and-key, some machinery manipulation. Well programmed and nicely implemented, but rather standard. One exceptional puzzle-room requires more thinking and experimenting, it combines different kinds of decryption and wordplay to obtain the necessary clues for unlocking the main gateway. Elaborate and time-consuming, and very satisfying to solve. Another solution is designed around something many IF-players find rather unpalatable in their adventures: riddles. I agree that riddles can be problematic: finding solutions to them often requires reading the author's mind (if it's an original riddle), or stepping out of the game-world and looking up the solutions on the internet. In this game however, the author manages to give the riddle-room a nice twist.

Bael's Rock was made in an IF-creation system cooked up by the author from scratch. That fact alone deserves praise. It also raises suspicions from the get-go. Many newly home-cooked IF-systems are shoddy and fragile, lacking the decades of experience, refinement, and ongoing development of the firmly established systems out there. Indeed, there was some discussion of this Bael's Rock system on the intfiction forum, particularly about the parser's deviation from the tried-and-true standard commands and abbreviations the IF-community has agreed upon over the decades. The author of Bael's Rock listened, and as a result the version I played is almost seamless in its handling of common commands and abbreviations, and it allows for many non-standard phrasings for the same actions (and some others...)

While playing Bael's Rock, I really felt like I was playing a part in a story. The way the interactive puzzle-rooms are embedded in the flow of the narrative journey that the author tells in the elaborate prologue and travel-sequences in between rooms lifted the whole of the experience above "puzzle-romp" or "cave-crawl". Even after the player finishes the game, there is a lengthy and thought-provoking epilogue that sets the entire game that came before against a new light.

Very good game. I hope to see more from this author and this system.

After I finished Bael’s Rock, I turned to the walkthrough – a document with which I’d become well-acquainted – to see if I could solve a multi-step Easter Egg that requires finding a series of clues across the game’s eight chapters. The walkthrough didn’t spell out the answers, only providing a series of hints, and the one for clue number 4 says it is “the most obscure one, requiring a code that is commonly used.” Ah, the contemporary IF player says, just gotta type XYZZY, doesn’t get much clearer than that, right? But it isn’t, because the full hint is actually “…commonly used in immersive-sim games.” I was able to solve the puzzle nonetheless – Thief and System Shock are some of my all-time favorites, so I knew exactly what it was getting it – but it’s symptomatic of a game that’s full of enthusiasm, but to its detriment feels cut off from the past several decades of parser-game development.

I don’t mean to overstate the case, here – heck, the completed Easter Egg is an Infocom reference (Spoiler - click to show)(you get some grue repellant). And I hate to come off parochial or a gatekeeper, I can think of numerous instances of authors who, because they were largely unburdened by expectations and preconceptions, have brought new, exciting ideas to the scene. And there are definitely glimmers of that in Bael’s Rock; there’s an extended riddle-duel that puts a clever spin on a hoary scenario, for example. But for the most part this is a collection of fantasy-themed medium dry goods puzzles of the sort seasoned players will have seen many times before, and the author’s seeming lack of familiarity with the state of the art makes proceedings feel significantly rougher than they needed to.

The most obvious place I felt this friction was the parser. This is a custom-built game, and it’s cool to see such things out there in the wild, especially released on Steam! But in a world where the major parser systems offer incredibly robust, well-tested gameplay, custom parsers are inevitably held to a high bar. In terms of features, Bael’s Rock generally does OK – most common abbreviations work, the up arrow key retrieves previous commands, you can get a history of the last couple of turns of output, and it seems to be able to handle sentences of comparable complexity to Inform, TADS, and Dialog.

But there are some notable omissions, like nonexistent handling of adjectives – I got very bored with having to type PUSH RED LEVER over and over instead of just PUSH RED. And the error messages are very frequently misleading, failing to clearly tell the player whether what they’re doing won’t work, or if the parser just wasn’t able to translate typed input into action: “you can’t examine that” and “you can’t take that” are very unhelpful responses when the player’s typo means the “that” just wasn’t recognized, and the fact that ILLUMINATE ITEM WITH TORCH spits out “you can’t use this item to do that” unless you’ve picked the exact right ITEM is actively misleading. Similarly, I had to go to the walkthrough for almost the first real puzzle of the game because PUT AMULET IN LION STATUE says “you can’t put it there”, rather than prompting you to be more specific about where exactly you want to place it.

The interface also provides more of that friction. Layout-wise, outside of cutscenes most locations have two main text boxes – the first being a largely-static description of the room, the second responding to player input, plus a command line below. It’s a reasonable enough approach, but many actions lead to output that won’t fit in that second box, meaning I very frequently had to hit enter to advance through two or three pages of text responding to a seemingly-innocuous command. I also experienced a slight delay when new text was displayed, either in response to actions or moving to a new room, which made certain sequences, like the maze – spoiler alert, there’s a maze, and you map it by dropping superfluous inventory items to track where you’ve been – feel molasses-slow. That’s a shame, especially because of the way it undermined a made a couple of puzzles that I enjoyed, but required a bit of trial and error by design, like the climactic sequence of the game.

Speaking of design, the puzzles here are very traditional, with every chapter requiring you to progress past a set-piece barrier of some kind. While there are a few exceptions, most of these involve simple object manipulation, fiddling with the occasional complex device, decoding abstruse hints, and the odd bit of magic. This is a classic formula, and again, in the abstract there are some solid brain-teasers here. But unfortunately in addition to the weak parser, there are some guess-the-verb issues that quickly taught me to run to the walkthrough rather than waste time trying to figure out what I’d missed – the most egregious offender here is an early hurdle where after you’ve collected three pieces of a cube-shaped key, I was nonplussed about how to actually use them. COMBINE KEY is, I suppose, a reasonable approach, but abstract, goal-driven verbs like that aren’t typically a part of the modern IF vocabulary, and there’s nothing in the game’s help text that indicated it’d be a reasonable thing to try, nor were comparably reasonable attempts like PUT FRAGMENT ON FRAGMENT successful.

The last place where the game could have benefitted from familiarity with post-80s IF design philosophies is the story. There is one, but it’s pretty thin: you’re abducted and abandoned in the middle of the desert, forced to find shelter in a mountain crammed stem to stern with a-wizard-did-it obstacles. There is a reasonably well-done, only somewhat telegraphed, twist at the end, but there are plenty of satisfying works of IF that have similar story structures. However, where most modern players would expect that a game like this would do some environmental storytelling, weaving some backstory into passing descriptions and otherwise creating a cohesive world that rewards exploration, Bael’s Rock mostly sticks to just the puzzles, ma’am – late in the day, you do find the journal of a previous adventurer, which I was hoping would provide an opportunity for just this kind of exposition, but it mostly just lampshaded the arbitrariness and implausibility of everything that had come before.

I am being hard on Bael’s Rock here, I recognize, perhaps out of proportion to its faults – there’s nothing wrong with its bones, even if it isn’t the kind of thing that sets my world on fire. But it’s really a shame to see what’s so clearly a passion project stumble repeatedly on problems that have been solved for decades (including the lack of a transcript feature, which is one reason I’ve been more specific about stuff like parser errors than usual). The good news is that the changelog indicates that the author’s been making upgrades, and the game ends with a blatant sequel tease. So even though I got as much frustration as enjoyment out of this game, by taking feedback on board, and hopefully building experience with contemporary IF approaches, I’ve no doubt the author could make something really special in the future.

First, caveat that this isn’t the kind of IF I’d normally play; I’m interested in the early days of the medium, but not so much in modern games that hearken back to them, and I generally like a strong story to go with my exploration and puzzle solving. So I am not the target audience for this one, but due to it being a part of this year's Review-a-thon, I still wanted to give it a try!

First, the presentation is very nice—it’s a clean layout with text encapsulated by boxes over background images that set the mood of each chapter perfectly. An inventory pane on the left side is a nice touch, and during one puzzle, a handy reference pops up in that sidebar too.

One aspect of the UI that didn’t work as well for me was the separate box for command responses. The room description always remains static in one box, but then all the other text cycles through the other—so you type a command, get a response, and then the response disappears (relegated to the text history, which you can view with a click) after you enter the next command. I found this a bit inconvenient when there was a description of something that I wanted to refer back to frequently, and this setup also requires a LOT of pressing enter—the response text was often broken up into two or more pieces, with an enter press required between each pair.

I also found myself fighting the parser at times. One example:

You can see a glowing blue object.

>x blue
You can’t examine that.

>x glowing
You can’t examine that.

>x glowing blue object
You can’t quite make out what the glowing blue object is.

>get it
You can’t get that

>get glowing blue object
You can’t get that

The first part of this sequence primed me to think that I had to type the full name of a thing to interact with it, but then the full name didn’t work when I tried to take, rather than examine, the object (the correct command turned out to be (Spoiler - click to show)“get object”).

There were other points where I struggled due to a lack of cuing. For instance, in the first room you’re collecting pieces of a cube, guided by a four-line poem. (Spoiler - click to show)I thus assumed I needed four pieces, and kept looking after finding three, but actually three was it; I learned this by re-examining the fragments, but I would have expected to be told I had them all upon collecting the third. I did enjoy that area (Chapter 2), though, especially the moment when I tried, certain it wouldn’t work, (Spoiler - click to show)putting my amulet in a lion statue’s mouth as a way to get rid of it—and that was actually the puzzle solution! The mirror area in chapter 6 was another highlight, with the portal being a fun mechanic (although I used the walkthrough for the exact wording—I didn’t remember (Spoiler - click to show)what the game had called the place where I dropped the sword, and it didn’t accept “chasm” or other synonyms that I tried. And I had no idea at all how to refer to the room where the sphere was).

In other areas, I leaned pretty heavily on the walkthrough. In Chapter 4, for example, (Spoiler - click to show)the game had cued me to be afraid of the toad, so I would never have guessed that purposely making him angry was the solution. I was also a bit disappointed by the final puzzle because it was so repetitive and, I felt, unintuitive ((Spoiler - click to show)I’d noticed the beast always lost focus after I dodged, but because it then immediately prepares an attack as usual, I hadn’t interpreted that as a cue to attack it); it didn’t feel like the strongest note to end on.

On the other hand, I liked the ending (Spoiler - click to show)twist about our mysterious guide and the player character’s fate. And the environments were fun to imagine and inhabit; the steampunk flying bridge, the firefly torch, the rotating room, were all memorable and cool. Some of the issues I brought up are definitely a matter of taste, and some good playtesting would smooth out the others.