Return to Claymorgue's Castle

by Anonymous

2024
Mystery
Twine

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Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Return to Claymorgue's Castle review, October 28, 2024
by EJ
Related reviews: IFComp 2024

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.

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