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.