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Lost in the desert, September 22, 2023This is one of three ParserComp entries by the author, which is the kind of work ethic that I feel like I can’t directly comment on without being consumed by jealousy. Each is an old-school ADRIFT puzzler, of various flavors – here, we’ve got another installment in the author’s long-running Alaric Blackmoon series of fantasy games. While there’s some continuity with earlier entries, with references to previous adventure sprinkled throughout the opening, XXR (you’d better believe I’m not typing that title again) seems to work quite well as a standalone, with a straightforward and engaging premise: there are rumors of monsters on the periphery, so you and your buddy the king need to cross a desert to check things out.
I’ve played some of those earlier games, but never to completion, and I was hoping this would be the one to break the streak – but alas, it was not to be. All of them have a fine-grained style that require the player to spell out exactly what they’re doing, step by step, rather than bottom line their actions. On the positive side, this contributes to a pleasant sense of immersion; I enjoyed the low-key opening section, where you need to barter for camels and equipment for your desert trip. Sure it’s a little fiddly to have to buy the transportation but then visit separate vendors to get saddlebags and tackle, then purchase clothes appropriate to the desert heat, but it helps sell the reality of the world, and establish that the player characters – you can swap between Alaric and the king whenever you like – are going to be fish out of water (er) on their trip.
On the downside, though, this granularity combined with some of the foibles of the ADRIFT parser to make the puzzles even harder than I think they’re intended to be. The first major section of gameplay involves exploring a ruined city where you’ve taken shelter from a sandstorm, which ultimately requires using an abandoned metallurgical workshop to duplicate a key. While it wasn’t too tough to figure out what I was supposed to do in general terms, each step involved wrestling with the parser. A key item can be found in the debris lying around the place, but SEARCH doesn’t reveal it – instead, you need to CLEAN WORKSHOP (I feel like cleaning abandoned workshops is right up there with cleaning a rental car in the implausibility sweepstakes). Similarly, getting water into the quenching trough is a bit of a struggle:
"> FILL TROUGH WITH WATERSKIN
You cannot fill anything with the water skin.
> FILL TROUGH WITH WATER
You pour some water into the trough from your water skin."
So I was able to make some progress, and found some intriguing secrets in the city, but eventually my progress petered out; the game does include context-specific hints, but through some combination of the system seeming to get confused with a different puzzle and/or me being too thick to figure out what I was missing, it couldn’t get me on track. This is a shame since I did enjoy aspects of the world, but between wrestling with the parser and the punishing puzzles – as well as an annoying quirk of ADRIFT that meant that I couldn’t reload the game when I died while playing as the king – I wasn’t too sad to wash my hands of it. Besides, even just in this Comp I’ll have two more chances to finally get through one of Horsfield’s games!