The Way Home

I didn’t find the context for The Way Home quite as dubious as that for Quest for the Serpent’s Eye, but I have to admit I also went into this one with my shoulders preemptively squared up: what we’ve got here is an ADRIFT adapting just the second half of a game the author had previously written for the C64. Perhaps I’m an inveterate stereotyper, but regardless I was expecting unwinnable states, low-context puzzles, minimal implementation, and objects requiring pixel-perfect searching to find.

There’s definitely some of that stuff here. The backstory is conveyed with minimal texture – you’re a Conan-style barbarian who’s just recovered a massive gemstone on behalf of some queen, for some reasons, that aren’t especially fleshed out. Leaving the forest where you found it, and facing the return trek across a trackless desert, you decide to stop off in a glacial valley to up your stocks of water (…can I venture a guess that the author isn’t a geologist?) And the first puzzle very much suffers from some fiddliness of implementation: you get captured by ice trolls in the prologue (I am not at all clear why they left me alive, but one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth I suppose) and need to do the classic cut-the-ropes-with-a-sharp-stone bit, but I found it very hard to tell whether the stone was too far away from me to get, or just hadn’t come up with the right phrasing, and even once I figured out the necessary intermediate step, there were still some misleading responses that delayed the solution yet further (Spoiler - click to show)(in particular, the game strongly prompts you to WEAR BLANKET, but if you try to THROW BLANKET AT STONE while you’re wearing it, you get an unhelpful generic error message, rather than being told that you need to manually remove it from your shoulders first).

Thankfully, things started to look up from there. The map of the valley is small and tersely-described, but it’s got an interesting mix of places to visit, and the subsequent puzzles are generally well-clued and offer some nice shortcuts – there’s one location that holds a bunch of different building materials, and I was a little worried about all the hoops I’d need to jump through to assemble the object I knew I needed, but fortunately MAKE worked a treat. There’s even a cool bit of global interactivity that winds up changing the descriptions and behavior of most of the map, which is implemented way more robustly than it needed to be since it only really impacts one puzzle. There is a slightly-unfair puzzle that forced me to restart – at one point you get an object that unlocks two new areas, and if you go first to the area that’s closest and which you have an in-game reason to be interested in, rather than going to the other side of the map to explore just for the sake of it, you’ll lock yourself into a dead-person-walking scenario – but this isn’t the kind of game where replays take very long once you know what you’re doing, and honestly I was expecting to hit something like that sooner.

And then after solving that area, you’re whisked away to a separate vignette in an entirely new area! This once again suffered from a lack of connective tissue – the problem you need to solve there does directly grow out of what you do in the first part, but it still feels like it comes out of nowhere. But this area has a lot of other characters, who have a reasonably broad set of conversation topics, and the puzzles shift from the predominantly medium-dry-goods affairs of the ice valley to ones having to do with helping, interrogating, investigating, or otherwise interacting with people, which I found more engaging. In fact I’d say I really enjoyed this second half; there’s still not much in the way of scenery or anything to do except solve the next puzzle in the chain, but the difficulty is pitched just right and it’s a perfectly serviceable bit of fantasy adventuring.

Sadly, the low-context thing returns in force: once you get to the end of the puzzle chain you’re basically handed an “I win” button to resolve the overall problem (Spoiler - click to show)(in the game’s defense, “here’s an apple, eat it and you’ll automatically beat the dragon” is not a plot twist I’ve seen before), and characteristically the game’s ending text is beyond anticlimactic, consisting of a single sentence saying you brought back the gem and the queen rewarded you. All of which is to say that The Way Home never transcends its origins, but it winds up a reasonably welcoming example of its form just the same.