The Woodcutter's Quest

It sounds like the very definition of damning with faint praise to say that my favorite thing about The Woodcutter’s Quest is the wood. But actually I quite enjoyed my time with the game! It’s just that it’s intentionally rather straightforward, an implementation of a pedagogical example used in a how-to-design-adventure-games book – a book entitled, in fact, How to Design Adventure Games (by Shaun McClure) just to be clear how straightforward we’re being here. It’s charmingly simple to my taste, boasting Classic Text Adventure Premise #17: a wizard has kidnapped the rest of your village, so it’s up to you to journey through the forest to his castle and save them. There are several puzzles that involve giving food to animals, the descriptions are terse but communicative, and provide solid clues about to overcome obstacles, and the implementation is of the high standard I’ve come to expect from the author. And per the ABOUT text, there are even some bonus puzzles and extra bells and whistles belted onto McClure’s chassis.

All that makes for a solid game but one with few surprises, so like I said, the wood-forward nature of the adventure really stood out. I mean, sure, it’s right there on the tin, but I figured the whole “you’re a woodcutter” thing was just an excuse for having you be out in the forest when the wizard comes calling, and maybe start you off with an axe already in your inventory. But actually said axe can be used to chop a surprisingly large number of objects into kindling – sometimes usefully, sometimes just for stress-relief – there are plentiful opportunities to search around in wooden objects or furniture, a key early puzzle revolves around making a fire from wood… heck, the background of the game’s itch.io page is even a tessellated mosaic of sawn-through logs! It’s commitment to the bit, and also makes the game feel more simulationist without making any of its puzzles too complex, since one bit of wood can generally be substituted for another. So yeah, I was a fan of the wood.

As for things I wasn’t as much a fan of, well, that’s a shorter list. I was sad not to have found an alternate way past the goblin, though there might well be one and I was jut too thick to notice. Beyond that, I had to look up the full answer to the puzzle I mentioned above involving fire, because it relies on some pyrodynamic assumptions that I think aren’t right (Spoiler - click to show) (surely in most cases throwing a jugfull of water on a moderately-sized fire will just produce some steam and maybe put out the fire, rather than producing smoke? For smoke you need wet wood, but burning the rotten wood didn’t get me smoke, and despite wrestling with the parser for quite a while I couldn’t convince it that I wanted to put any of my large pile of wood into the easily-accessible river to get it damp).

The fact that I just spent so much time quibbling about one small aspect of a puzzle is an indication of just how tight the game is overall – it’s a textbook example of the small-fantasy-text-adventure genre, and if along with praise for the effectiveness of the execution, that also suggests a cap on how exciting it can be, well, so it goes. I was more than happy to enjoy Woodcutter’s Quest for what it is – but also because if I squint at it, I can see the outline of a much weirder game that really goes whole hog on the woodworking angle. Maybe some newcomer turned onto IF by this game, or the book it’s riffing on, will take up the gauntlet? Stranger things have happened.