Dead Man's Chest

In every event where I use a randomizer, I feel like there are at least one or two coincidences that prove that God does in fact play dice with the universe, and this time out the cosmic joke is that out of the combined list of 40 ParserComp and Review-a-Thon games, I wound up playing Garry Francis’s pair of ParserComp entries one after the other. What are the odds of that? Well, like 3 or 4 percent, I think, depending on the math I’m too lazy to attempt for the edge case where one of them is first or last on the list so it’s only got a single neighbor, rather than one on each side – which explains why when you’re randomizing 30-70 games stuff like this is bound to happen, I suppose.

But if Dead Man’s Chest and Woodcutter’s Quest were going to wind up back to back, I’m happy this is the order they landed in, rather than putting Woodcutter’s Quest second. Per my review, I enjoyed playing the earlier game, but it’s by design a simpler game, and adapted from another author’s initial plot and puzzle framework. So I was glad to get to chase it with a shot of the uncut stuff. Oh, the premise is still a classic one – it’s a treasure hunt through the abandoned manor of an old pirate captain (in fact the same captain from one of the author’s earlier games, in a nice bit of mythos-building) with all the secret passages, shipwrecks, and sandy coves that implied. But everything here is just a bit more robust and fleshed out – it’s specified that the mansion is empty because the captain’s last descendent died intestate, which for some obscure reason is a word I always love to hear deployed. For one example, careful attention has been paid to the geography and interconnections of what’s a reasonably large map, with a few optional puzzles providing a sense of how the pieces all fit together. For another, even small incidental descriptions are written to highlight what your character, a treasure-hunter on the make, would notice and do. Like, here’s the response to X PANELLING in an early room:

"The panels are chipped and faded with age. You tap on them to check for any hollows where treasure could be hidden, but everything sounds solid."

For a game like this, though, all that stuff is secondary to the puzzles, and they’re a solid lot. There’s nothing that stands out especially, as the kind of thing you get up to is exactly the kind of thing you get up to in a pirate-themed text adventure: you push and prod the furniture to reveal the aforementioned secret passages, there’s business with ropes and locked roll-top desks, and even a (appropriately easy) riddle at the end. For all that they’re workmanlike, they reward careful observation, which made them often satisfying to solve.

That “often” covers up the one thing I’d critique about the game, which is the few occasions when I think Dead Man’s Chest prioritizes challenge over narrative coherence. The primary offender is the puzzle that opens up the secret passage I’ve mentioned a couple of times – I knew it was there, having noticed tell-tale grooves on the floor, but thought it opened from the other side as attempting to PUSH or PULL the relevant piece of furniture was an exercise in futility. After consulting a hint, though, I discovered that actually I was on the right track, but I’d needed to use the verb SLIDE instead of the more familiar alternatives I chose. This is arguably overly precious as a matter of general implementation, but also faintly ridiculous as applied to the actual situation – having seen the grooves the protagonist knew exactly which direction the wall was supposed to swing open, so what, they were just pushing perpendicular to that without deigning to mention that’s what they were doing? I ran into a similar issue with one of those optional puzzles mentioned above, where neither opening a curtain, re-checking the room description once it was open, or even explicitly typing LOOK BEHIND CURTAIN revealed that there was in a fact a new piece of scenery available (I was supposed to examine the wall instead). There’s a thin line between “puzzles that reward careful observation” and “mimesis-breaking pixelbitching,” I suppose, but these are a couple of places where Dead Man’s Chest runs afoul of it.

Still, I mention these issues largely just to flag them for potential tweaks in future releases, and to acknowledge them as exceptions to the rule. This is one of the best-designed and best-implemented iterations of one of the comfort-food IT setups, and even when I struggled with problems both of my own making and not, the helpful contextual hints quickly got me back on track. If you’re at all interested in old-school puzzlefests, this one’s a treat.