#daniel stelzer

This one was really something. I had been starting to think "Where are the big-map puzzlefests this year?" to myself over the last few games I played, which is no poor reflection on them; and, well, here is a big-map (around 70 rooms) game with, by any reasonable count, several dozen interlocking puzzles. I spent way too long banging my head against them this last week, and I loved every minute of it.

You're a dog, which is a great initial premise; not only that, but you're a dog in the late days of the Bronze-Age Hittite empire, in a world where magic is an everyday fact of life, you're owned by a village wise-woman who takes advantage of the fact that dogs are believed to be able to absorb and transport magic. (Much of the game is clearly very carefully researched, and the optional footnotes that the game offers are a real delight, informative without being obtrusive, and always interesting.) The inciting premise of the game is that you have to figure out how to remove a curse that has been placed on your owner; normally, she is the one to remove curses, but since the curse is on her, she's out of action.

The early part of the game focuses on learning the mechanics of how spells get moved around, what they can be applied to, and how they affect you while you're carrying them; there are a series of relative easy puzzles to get the player through this, and it all goes pretty smoothly at the beginning. There are numerous sub-goals along the way: in the first half of the game, the PC needs to take his human's place in helping to get the tributary offerings transported to the capital for tax day, each of which is a specific problem motivating exploration and magic use; the second half, mostly in the capital, is basically a treasure hunt while the PC tries to earn enough money to help him buy equipment that makes more advanced magic-use possible so that new problems (and a few remaining open problems from the early part of the game) can be solved.

All of the puzzles are fair, although a few are quite difficult; there's a built-in hint system (with the THINK verb) that gracefully directs you toward things you've missed and open problems that are currently solveable, and there's also a map in the status area of the screen that provides hints about which open problems can currently be addressed. If that sounds too coddly, it can all be disabled in-game, but I found that I only needed to consult it occasionally and it wasn't too pushy. (There is a bit of in-game intro text of the "if you've never played parser IF, here are some general suggestions" type that I wish could be easily disabled, and there is occasional "gosh, you're looking at the footnotes a lot; don't worry, you can always look at them later" reminder that I wish had been just a little less aggressive; but these are fine-tuning issues with what I think is basically a good idea that is mostly executed quite well.)

For those problems that are very difficult, Stelzer provides a set of Invisiclues-style hints that are very detailed and give gradual hints without immediately giving the whole solution away; I occasionally glanced at them when I found a problem intractable, and I mostly found that the first hint or two in the sequence for a problem was all I needed to see to understand how to solve it. For those problems were I did need to read the whole thing, it was always more or less good enough (although the "get the bowl from the soldiers" problem was fiddly enough that I wanted the last clue to be just a tiny bit more explicit, because I must have tried to pull of the solution I basically understood nearly a dozen times before I managed to actually pull it off). Similarly, there's a bonus problem that I would not have solved without simply looking at the solution: it's objectively fair, but quite hard, as the hints warn from the very beginning.

I think what most sells this particular game is the depth and richness of the world, and the way that it's introduced gracefully, without info-dumping, gradually, through the course of normal gameplay. It might have been awkward and annoying in any number of ways—for instance, many of the puzzles boil down to being basically inventory-management puzzles with a very small inventory limit, which I tend to find tedious and annoying. Not here, though: the inventory limits make sense, the parameters of magic usage make sense, the puzzle constraints always have a believable in-world solution. Like the very best parser IF puzzles, the more difficult problems tended to get solved accidentally, at the back of my brain, while I was away from the laptop I was playing the game on and doing something else, not even thinking about it: the pieces just clicked into place and I thought, oh, of course, if you just .... and that was it. The puzzle made sense and the solution was obvious, almost without exception.

So this was quite a game, and I really enjoyed spending most of a week on it. Daniel Stelzer's last two IFComp games were fun, polished pieces, too, but this is the best I've seen yet.

(My rating: 9/10. I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)