A Warm Reception

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!