Wearing the Claw

In the design notes revealed at the end of the game, Paul O'Brian tells us that one of his goals was to experiment with a more natural scoring system. On the one hand, he says, having a numerical score breaks the fourth wall; on the other hand, without a score players may feel lost, since they do not know whether they are on the right way. How to resolve this tension? The problem was discussed in the newsgroup, and Wearing the Claw presents a possible solution.

This scoring mechanism is only a tiny aspect of the game, but I bring it up to show how big the gulf is between 1996 and 2011. The tension outlined in the previous paragraph will strike nobody as a serious problem, because nobody expects to have a numerical score anymore. Progression through the game can be shown in so many ways -- most simply by just having the story continue -- that implementing a magical claw that changes as the player succeeds or fails seems like an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist. So much has changed: when Galatea came out in 2000, people complained that it wasn't clear how you could "win" it. Such a complaint would now be unimaginable.

Wearing the Claw is a short, solid game, but one that would not do well in a competition in 2011. It is a string of more or less random puzzles, most of which require at least some experimentation. The NPCs are schematic. The locations are sparse. The story is -- well, there, but that's the most you can say of it.

On top of that, you can easily get the game into an unwinnable state. This makes the game seem very cruel to a modern player, even though the author probably did not design it that way: in 1996, the message that one of your objects was destroyed was a big warning that you had done something wrong, whereas in 2011 it sounds like it is part of the story. What was once obvious is now obscure.

This game, then, would have scored quite well fifteen years ago; but it has aged badly.

(If this is how we look back on games from 2011 in 2026, I will be one happy critic!)

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