Return to Claymorgue's Castle

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Is there such thing as pedigree in IF? Actually, is pedigree itself ANYTHING??? Other than a socially imposed privileging system? Wow, got off track there. What I mean to ask is “Scott Adams approved this homage of his work. HOW COOL IS THAT??” Is there anything more rewarding than getting the imprimatur of an artistic inspiration? I feel like Claymorgue has already won … something… and anything we say about it from here is just gravy. Kudos author, and kudos Scott for top-tier menschhood. Just positivity on positivity.

I think it says a alot about the chill, supportive vibe of that whole background that it did not unfairly raise my expectations in any way. The whole thing was so generous and earnest it encouraged me to engage the work in a similar positive spirit. This is a team-investigates-mysterious castle jam. It leverages an underused gameplay design of NPC specialists, who can be employed in their specific areas to solve puzzles. I know I’ve seen it before, but infrequently, and it is a welcome change of pace when I do. It also is fully committed to its pixel-art esthetic and I am here for that. It puts the piece squarely of a time with its inspiration.

Its gameplay is Twinesformer - parser gameplay via link-select UI. This choice necessarily restricts command space in a way that kind of echoes restricted-verb parsers of bygone days, but with more modern link-select chrome. Its presence is, in the context of 2024 IFCOMP, a clear case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Other 2024 works had me clamoring, clamoring!, for a paned UI paradigm. Along comes Claymorgue and here we go! Was it all I hoped for??

Ehhh, no.The paning did unclutter the transcript portion of the game, that’s a plus. But it broke it into 3 separate panes, on extreme quadrants of the screen, ensuring maximum inconvenience in swiping cursor around. It further compounded inconvenience by requiring a MINIMUM of 4 clicks to get anything done. Character-Verb-Noun-Enter. A default actor and enter-on-noun could have cut that in half in most cases. I’m not in the business of comparisons, but this is NOT what I had in mind. Interacting with the game was, and I take no joy in saying this, a chore.

It was further compromised by implementing a crucial pane as scrolling, with no visual clue that this was true. In at least three cases, information (portable items!) necessary to progress were hidden below the pane bottom, with no indication I should scroll to find them. It was further, further compromised by changing its entry norms for character interaction where selecting a second character works differently than initiating action. All in all, I never stopped fighting the intrusive interface start to finish.

How about underlying (parser adjacent) gameplay? Again, I wanted more. One artifact of Twinesformers is that you have a limited verb roster to select among. This means, often, you need to play a ‘which not-quite-right verb can I contort to get things done?’ game. There are bigger issues though. For one, despite having the ability to highlight interesting nouns (a way to quietly steer the player to areas of interest), the highlighted nouns here were overrun with red herrings. Not just red herrings that you couldn’t interact with, red herrings that gave generic ‘you cannot’ messages, even when just trying to examine them! WHY WERE THEY HIGHLIGHTED IN THE FIRST PLACE??? There are ‘fiddle’ messages, random comments or business from your companions to remind you they are there. These messages are sometimes trivial, sometimes nonsensical, but sometimes read like hints or events that need addressing ASAP! They never are though, which I can attest after many fruitless attempts to engage them.

Puzzle play is similarly challenged. There were puzzles that required you to examine something twice, when the first examine gave NO clue you had not exhausted its value. Other puzzles required you to dawdle in locations for random amounts of time, despite NOTHING interesting to hold your attention there! In a key final puzzle, you needed to have told one character to read things turns ago, THEN read something later, and only if those two unconnected and unhinted things were done, was a final location unlocked.

What I’m saying is, it was unplayable without the walkthrough. I appreciate walkthroughs and/or HINTS in IFCOMP (and generally) as I have a propensity to get off a game’s vibe and struggle. With IFCOMP’s punishing time limit it can be instrumental to get unblocked to see a fuller picture of a work. If my reaction on reading HINT/walkthrough spoiler is “JJ you IDIOT, that puzzle is GENIUS!!” I know I’m in good hands. If my response is “Uh, wot?” … that’s trouble. In a particularly egregious example, the climactic ‘you have won’ text was ONLY present in the walkthrough, it was not presented to me in-game! Without walkthrough, I would not have known the game was over!

So yeah, this was a full two hours of unnecessarily difficult struggle. But. That easy-going, positive vibe? It was EVERYWHERE. In the color text. In character interactions. In room descriptions. In object descriptions (when provided). In discoverable lore documents. As much as I struggled with the gameplay and UI, the prose and the underlying pixel art were just… welcoming. Despite all those good reasons above, I couldn’t stay mad at the game, it continually sparked with earnest good will. Despite it all, I nevertheless felt Sparks of Joy. I’m not a monster.

Played: 9/5/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished (everyone satisfied) via walkthru
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive ui/gameplay
Would Play Again?: No, experience is complete

Postscript: I think my favorite moment, which I feel compelled to document, was (Spoiler - click to show)finding detailed instructions to transmute lead into gold. The step-by-step featured a complicated setup, complicated finishing, but whose middle step was “Do the Transmutation.” I laughed long and loud at this. Classic Step 1/Step2/PROFIT!! gag.

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

Usually when I have to review a game I really didn’t get on with, I try to avoid being excessively mean by doing some comedy, maybe going high-concept with a song parody or police blotter or what have you. I’m not doing that here, however, because despite finding Return to Claymorgue’s Castle quite unpleasant to play, I feel like I did get something out of the experience, and explaining what and why requires going into a fair bit of detail about all the things that didn’t work for me.

The game is an authorized sequel to one of Scott Adams’s lesser-played adventures – at least, 1984’s Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle doesn’t have any reviews or ratings on IFDB – taking what appears to have been a fantasy collect-a-thon and giving it the Scooby Doo treatment. You play a journalist who rolls up at the gates of the eponymous fortress with the rest of your crew – a researcher, a hacker, and an athlete – bent on uncovering… well, something or other, the game isn’t really big on motivation beyond exploration for its own sake. So far, so old-school, and the approach to puzzles is likewise quite traditional: outside of a spot of device-manipulation to crack a computer password, you’ll be walking through gimmick-free mazes, digging for secrets, making a grappling hook, and using MacGuffin A to unlock MacGuffin B. The one mechanical twist is that often, you’ll need to enlist the aid of your comrades to get through a puzzle: like, the hacker obviously is the one who can unlock the computer, the athlete is thee only one who can successfully throw the grappling hook, etc.

Now, I must confess that the Scott Adams style of two-word parser games is not a subgenre I find particularly appealing. I never played them back in the day, so there’s no nostalgia value, and the terse prose, primitive interface, and sometimes-unfair puzzles are just not what I come to IF for. As to the last of these, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle lives down to its lineage: the puzzles are severely underclued, with most near-misses, like trying to throw that grappling hook yourself, generating default “that won’t work” messages that don’t provide a push to the intended answer, not to mention a few places where I’m not sure how anyone could progress without going to the walkthrough. For example, pretty much the first challenge of the game requires you to go through the maze to a nondescript area, and then examine a patch of weeds twice, with the first just resulting in another generic failure message.

Admittedly, many of the more traditional lock-and-key puzzles were at least more straightforward, but that brings me to the game’s first point of departure from its inspirations: instead of the traditional two-word parser, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is implemented as a parserlike choice game in Twine. Now, this is a subgenre I tend to enjoy, but the interface here is about the most literal, cumbersome interpretation of the concept you can imagine. In theory, this shouldn’t be that bad – you’ve got the list of characters and their inventories in the left-hand sidebar, the room description and contents in the middle one, and the verb list in the right. But the verb list is long and somewhat fiddly, and you need to manually select yourself as the person doing the action even if you’re alone – plus if you accidentally click object-verb instead of verb-object, the action queue gets reset. As a result, constructing the simplest command requires at least four clicks, and possibly scrolling up and down three separate sub-windows, with more complex actions being more click-happy still.

It’s tortuously slow, and made worse by the low contrast provided by the pixel-art backgrounds and the frequent guess-the-verb issues – sometimes examining would work to reveal what a piece of writing said, sometimes only reading it, and sometimes, as with the leaflet you start out carrying, neither will. Similarly, I could never figure out how to actually talk to any of the other characters, though they do occasionally interject with their thoughts (often when you’re in the middle of clicking to make a command, which means you miss these bits of dialogue unless you notice that the main window’s changed in time). And since the game mechanics require a lot of clue-free trial-and-error where you need to attempt every action you can think of, and then try the exact same actions again with the other members of your group, anyone susceptible to RSI will be a whimpering mess by the halfway mark.

Beyond the interface, the game’s other major difference from its 1980s antecedents is the prose. Afficionados of the era often say they enjoyed the minimalism that early microcomputers’ memory constraints imposed: with the games only able to fit a few words per location, item, or character, players’ imaginations could run wild. Return to Claymorgue’s Castle, by way of contrast, adopts a style that can be charitably described as logorrhetic. Even the emptiest of locations gets hundreds of words of description long on telling me exactly what I was meant to be feeling and short on the actual details that would evoke those feelings. The prose is weighted down by excessive adjectives and adverbs, and frequently talks itself in circles, repeating words or even whole ideas from one sentence to the next. Like, here’s the drawbridge:
"
The drawbridge is old and rusty, with wooden planks that creak and crack. The chains that hold it are thick and heavy, but also worn and corroded. The drawbridge spans over the moat, which is deep and murky. The water is stagnant and foul, with patches of algae and slime. I can’t see the bottom of the moat, but I imagine it is full of bones and debris. The moat surrounds the castle, which is imposing and gloomy. The walls are high and thick, with towers and battlements. The entrance is a large archway, with a portcullis and a gate. The entrance is dark and ominous, with no signs of welcome or warmth."

And here’s a door:

"A sturdy wooden door, its entrance barred by a hefty bolt, conceals untold enigmas. This ancient milieu, rich with history, murmurs the chronicles of eras past. The wooden door, its secrets kept by the heavy bolt."

(There was not even a single enigma here, let alone untold ones – I’d already been around to the other side of the door, it led from a kitchen to a courtyard).

My eyes glazed over early, and I found myself skimming the text desperately looking for the few pieces of concrete information or game-relevant objects amid the flavorless tide of oatmeal. The author’s native language doesn’t appear to be English, so I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on their language skills, and perhaps there’s something about the translation process that led to this muck (my sense is that an LLM let loose on perfectly fine foreign-language text could certainly generate sludge of the quality here on display). But regardless, the game would have been far better served by a dramatically simpler syntax and vocabulary.

And that’s my little revelation: while I don’t like the simple parser, terse writing, and barely-clued puzzles of this particular tradition, in fact those elements all fit together quite snugly, if not elegantly. If your puzzles are going to demand exhaustive testing of possibilities without much feedback, you need a fast, straightforward interface to make that bearable, and clean prose that focuses on the stuff you actually need to interact with to win. Or turn it around: if you’ve got a relatively simpler parser, you might need harder puzzles to keep the gameplay from likewise feeling too simplistic, and a writing style that’s clear enough that the player won’t try to type stuff the game can’t recognize.

So by sticking to this particular flavor of puzzle design, while unsuccessfully trying new things on the interface and stylistic sides of things, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle wound up giving me a backhanded appreciation for how they used to do things in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m going to be running out to play all the Scott Adams classics as a result – but I suspect if I did I’d have far more appreciation for them than I did before.

In this game, the PC leads a team of specialists to explore a mysterious castle. It’s a choice-based game that tries to emulate a parser experience, having the player click to select a subject, verb, and object before submitting the action.

The concept of gameplay that revolves around figuring out not just what action should be taken, but who should be taking it, is unusual and intriguing. In practice, however, I found this game's implementation of it unwieldy. It just takes so many clicks to complete any action (except for moving around the map). Having the subject default to “me” unless otherwise specified would have helped, I think, though that still leaves a lot of clicking and I’m not really sure what else could be done to streamline this interface.

Between this and the white text that contrasts poorly with the busy pixel backdrops and lacks paragraph spacing, I have to say that I experienced so much friction in the process of trying to play the game that I wasn’t really able to appreciate the content. I’m sure there’s a lot to like here if you’re less frustrated by the interface, but I didn’t have a good time. That said, I do have to give it some respect for its success in bending Twine into a pretzel without breaking it—which is to say, it’s a highly technically ambitious game that clearly has had a lot of care and attention put into ensuring that it’s bug-free.

I had a bit of trouble getting this game to work at first. It's a heavily modified Twine game that uses a kind of parser command format through selecting verbs and nouns via links.

I kept selecting a verb and an object, but nothing would happen. I eventually realized that you had to click the player, then the verb, then the object, then a yellow arrow that would then appear. Thus, most commands (outside of movement) take 4 clicks to execute, while some take 5 (those involving multiple objects).

You're part of a team of four, including a historian, a techie, a tough guy, and you, who is (I think) a reporter. Each of you starts in a different location, but you can command others to move around or follow you. Each has skills only they can use.

Once I figured out commands, I had difficulty finding things to do. I tried 'examining' objects, but most said 'No action available' or something similar. Most of my actions were rebuffed, so I decided to follow the walkthrough exactly.

I found out that several of the 'No action available' objects were important, and, in fact, one had to be examined twice! And your teammatest have to be moved around a lot. I'm glad I had the walkthrough, as I would have been completely stymied without it.

The writing is interesting. It generally uses very complex English, with only occasional typos. Room descriptions were rich, but could become repetitive. In many rooms there are shadows that dance, spectral things you can see, and secrets waiting to be found.

One room has almost exactly the same description repeated twice. Perhaps there were two versions in the draft that the author couldn't decide between, and both were accidentally left in? It's this one:

The air is heavy with the spectral echoes of the past, whispering tales of medieval times. The castle, once a symbol of power and grandeur, now stands as a spectral monument, a haunting reminder of the impermanence of man’s creations.

This place, steeped in history and shrouded in mystery, is a silent witness to the passage of time, its spectral presence a haunting echo of a bygone era. It is a place where the past lingers on, its spectral whispers carried on the wind, a chilling reminder of the castle’s former glory and the transience of human endeavour.

While the large vocabulary and repeated words could be seen poetically, I found myself sometimes longing for shorter, more varied descriptions that gave more specific details about this setting or clues about its inhabitants.

The large number of details became frustrating when they included seemingly helpful things that are not implemented. I wonder why the author took the time to include so many details about the van, when none of them can be interacted with:

The van is painted in a vibrant color scheme: the bottom is bright blue, while the top is lime green. An orange horizontal stripe separates the two sections. On the side of the van, there is a large psychedelic logo that says "Fantasticmobile" in stylized and colored letters. It has a retro design, with a rounded shape and a large panoramic windshield.

Interior: The cockpit has two seats wrapped in a colorful striped fabric. The steering wheel and dashboard have a vintage design, with analog gauges and a large chrome steering wheel. Behind the cockpit, there is a large space that can be used to transport people or equipment. This space is often filled with everything the team might need to solve mysteries, including a map, a flashlight, a camera, and even some tools. The floor of the van is covered with a thick and comfortable carpet.

Features: The roof of the van is openable, creating an ideal observation point for scanning the surrounding landscape. The side of the van has a retractable panel that reveals a laboratory complete with tools and accessories for solving mysteries. The rear bumper of the van is equipped with a tow hitch, which can be used to tow a trailer with additional equipment.

Curiosities: The Fantasticmobile was designed and built by a member of the team, who is an expert in mechanics and engineering. The van is powered by a silent and high-efficiency electric motor, making it ideal for following suspects without being detected. The Fantasticmobile is a true symbol of the team, representing their spirit of adventure and their commitment to solving mysteries.

The author wrote this game in tribute to an early Scott Adams game, and wrote to Adams to get express permission for this game. The letter sent and the letter received can both be seen in the game, one in the intro and one in-game.

There is background pixel art which at times helped me understand the game world, taken from Wikipedia. Occasionally it obscured the text, but only in a few rooms.

Overall, I was impressed with the technical skill of the sugarcube programming; it must have been very difficult to implement this!