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A Warm Reception

by Joshua Hetzel

(based on 10 ratings)
Estimated play time: 40 minutes (based on 1 vote)
Members voted for the following times for this game:
3 reviews10 members have played this game. It's on 3 wishlists.

About the Story

You're a reporter assigned to cover the wedding of the princess of the land. When you get there, you find an empty castle and are pulled into the mystery of what happened.

Explore a vast castle. Solve baffling puzzles. An old school style text adventure without the old school cruelty. Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre (has in game instructions and a limited list of verbs to reduce confusion).

Awards

Ratings and Reviews

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(1)
3 star:
(8)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating: based on 10 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 3
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Lots of potential, October 16, 2024
Related reviews: IFComp 2024

This is a sweet, fairly simple game that wasn’t quite what I expected based on the blurb. The mystery is solved via notes you happen upon throughout the castle, and is incidental to the main objective, (Spoiler - click to show)which is collecting items of armor (and possibly a sword) in order to defeat a dragon. It took me only about a half hour to finish, and my playthrough started with this infelicitous exchange:

Castle Entrance
You see the entrance to the castle in the east, and it has been thrown open, with no one inside. The entryway is covered in soot and burn marks. Whatever caused this doesn't seem to be nearby anymore. At your feet is a small booklet with the heading "Instruction Booklet"

>get booklet
That's hardly portable.

>x entryway
You can't see any such thing.

>x marks
You can't see any such thing.

>x soot
You can't see any such thing.

Having discovered that only important nouns are implemented, though, the rest of my play time was much smoother. It helps that the descriptions are pretty bare-bones, so there aren’t a lot of scenery items to attempt to examine. It’s a fairly minimalist game, requiring mostly simple exploration and straightforward actions. The trickiest puzzle, I think, is one I skipped on my first playthrough and only solved on a subsequent one by looking at the hints ((Spoiler - click to show)accessing the moth room--okay sure, you just need to turn off the lantern, but I've been trained not to try to navigate in the dark in parser games!). As this implies, the game is winnable without collecting every item, which is a nice point of design. You can enter the endgame at any time, but the more items you have, the better your chances. I felt the odds were good enough once I had 13 out of 18 points, and I was right!

The next thing I did after winning was restart and try (Spoiler - click to show)facing the dragon with zero items, and I just happened to beat the 1-in-20 odds and win again! But even though you can theoretically do that on a first playthrough, that would mean missing out on uncovering the story, which would be a shame. It was a delightful surprise to encounter a queer storyline, and I liked the gradual revelation of the details. Also, Ralph is a sweetheart.

I do think the story could have been revealed a little more gracefully; instead of people having conveniently written down every bit of relevant information and then left those notes lying around, why not give me an ability to, say, hear magical echoes of recent conversations? That kind of thing would also deepen the worldbuilding, which was pretty minimal and a bit random. For instance, the year is 1680, and there’s a castle-dwelling king ruling the land, but there’s also a mention of the PC intending to take photographs, and a pizza (which inexplicably contains a key and a ticket) makes an appearance.

The feelies clearly had a lot of effort put into them, and are thorough and helpful as a result. I didn’t need to turn to the hints or map on my first playthrough, but I made use of them on my second to get the points I had missed. I think there’s a lot of potential here, and with some beefing up—implementing more scenery objects to add richness to the world, developing the worldbuilding a bit—this would make a very solid game!

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Search a castle to get stronger to fight a battle, September 16, 2024*
Related reviews: about 1 hour

Seeing this game gave me trepidation. Marked 'an hour and a half', parser game, 'Old School', 'Excellent for new players and veterans of the genre', a classic-looking castle on the cover; it had all the markings of some custom-parser windows executable game that is huge and buggy and the author keeps insisting 'The game is easy' or 'You're playing wrong', as has happened in countless past IFComps.

Imagine my relief when:

* The first sentence made me laugh, and
* the game turned out to be fair, well-programmed, and have an adjustable play length.

In this game, you are a reporter assigned to cover a royal wedding. You arrive late (intentionally) to find everyone gone and the castle unusually hot.

This game lets you access the end from the beginning! At any point you can enter the final battle, with a random chance to win based on your overall score. So the game only really lasts as long as you want it.

Gameplay is pretty simple, mostly 'pick up item and use it here'. There are some more complex puzzles; there was one maze I solved halfway but gave up on just because I don't really like mazes. Once I saw the spoilery map, I realized that it wasn't even hard, but such is the fate of weak walkthrough users like myself. The only other hard puzzle was one that I had seen others talking about on here so I knew how to solve.

There were several unimplemented interactions and synonyms.

Overall, the interactions were satisfying and the writing funny. Something felt a bit 'light' about the game, both in puzzles and writing, but what is here seemed good. I do think I ran into a bug or unusual luck, because I was able to beat a luck-based game without rigging it the way the game suggested.

* This review was last edited on October 16, 2024
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Reporter at large, November 23, 2024
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2024

I find it very hard to review a game like A Warm Reception, because it’s part of a very well-populated subgenre – the anachronism-and-joke-filled fantasy romp by a first-time parser author – that could just as well be designed to frustrate criticism. These games are usually more wacky than funny, inevitably have some infelicities of implementation, and offer up puzzles you’ve generally seen a million times before and a plot that you’ve seen a couple million more than that. But all of that is besides the point; these games are mostly earnest learning experiences, where the author is visibly having a great time making a world and bringing it to life. And that enthusiasm can be infectious when, like the present case, they’re well put-together. So perhaps the thing to do is take as read all the above critiques, so we can just move on to the things that are relatively unique about A Warm Reception.

It must be said that the premise is one of those elements that stands out – you’re a medieval reporter who’s going to the princess’s wedding reception to write a puff piece – but also one that the game jettisons on pretty much the first screen. The castle is of course deserted (relatable, NPCs are tricky!) because a dragon’s rather spoiled the party by attacking, so it’s of course up to you to save the day by driving off the beast (in fairness, if you try to sleep the narrator will demur, saying “you need to finish the case”, so it’s unclear you really know how journalism is supposed to work). So off you go to ransack your way through the mid-sized castle, looking for the equipment that will give you an edge in the final fight with nary a second thought of the “wait, doesn’t the king have a guy for this sort of thing?” variety to slow you down.

That actually leads to a second unique element: rather than having to check every item off the scavenger hunt before you can reach the endgame, you can give it a go any time you like, with your score giving you bonuses on a d20 roll that determines the outcome. It’s the kind of idea that could work in a tabletop RPG, but winds up unsatisfying in an IF context; for one thing, you can just UNDO-scum to get to the winning sequence right out the gate, and for another, your reward for gutting out a close victory is that you miss out on content. More charitably I suppose the idea is that you get to skip puzzles that you aren’t working for you, but actually the puzzles are fun enough that I was motivated to finish them all. Sure, a bunch are straightforward lock-and-key dealies, and there’s a maze with a blink-and-you-missed-it gimmick, but the author manages to deploy typical medium-dry-goods interactions in entertaining ways – the puzzle chain involving the moths is especially good.

So much for the bits that are memorable. The prose and implementation fall into the “workmanlike” category; I won’t harp on the latter, except to note that there are a few places where simply examining an object triggers an action, like allowing you to input the combination to a safe, which led to some moments of confusion (for the author, I noted a couple of additional small snags in the attached transcript). As to the former, well, this is the kind of medieval fantasy world where they eat pizza and reference break-dancing and professional wrestling. For all that I still found the plot more endearing than it needs to be, with patriarchal mores lightly sent up and love conquering all in the end.

Now that I’ve run through a bunch of particulars, by tradition I should now transition back to some general judgment and overall critical evaluation of A Warm Reception. But as I said, that’s devilishly hard – it’s a solidly engaging but slightly rough entry in a deeply inessential subgenre, so what does that make it? I guess we can just call it a promising start for an author who might very well wow us with their second game.

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1 Off-Site Review

Final Arc
IFComp 2024 Impressions: A Warm Reception is The Hottest Scoop Yet
If there's anything A Warm Reception does well, it's making playtime interactive (no spoilers, as usual!). Soon after entering the castle to see what's wrong you find a place with the final level of the game. A little sudden, sure, but it's the catch of speeding towards the end of this tale that makes things interesting...
See the full review

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A Warm Reception on IFDB

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