{"id":1981,"date":"2011-10-13T00:03:51","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T07:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1981"},"modified":"2017-01-04T17:28:26","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T01:28:26","slug":"ifcomp-2011-cold-iron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1981","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2011: Cold Iron"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I say I’m going to blog the Comp, and then it takes me a matter of days to write my first post. Let’s rectify that. First up is Cold Iron<\/em> by Lyman Clive Charles. Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Well, if all the games are this short, I won’t have any trouble finishing them all by month’s end. This is a sketch of a story, quite linear and constrained, with few interactions available beyond the necessary.<\/p>\n

There’s some sort of multi-leveled narrative going on here. You start off as a simple farmer in the middle ages looking for an axe that he fears has been stolen by “piskeys”. Under the player’s control, he repeatedly turns to a book of fairy tales for advice. (Yes, it would be unusual for a farmer in the middle ages to be literate. The game acknowledges this.) I thought at first that he was being set up as a fool, but no, his fantasies prove consistently reproducible. Up to a certain point, anyway. The moment you touch cold iron, traditional bane of enchantments, the game switches you without announcement to a different and less enchanted character, someone who’s apparently just trying to imagine the superstitions that a medieval farmer would apply to his situation. The game ends shortly after that switch, apparently satisfied that it has made its point. But I honestly don’t know what point it thinks it was making. Did the farmer in the first part only exist in the other fellow’s imagination? It’s unclear. And a confusingly-written opening paragraph suggests that the author might be in the habit of overestimating the reader’s ability to pick up on what he’s trying to imply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I say I’m going to blog the Comp, and then it takes me a matter of days to write my first post. Let’s rectify that. First up is Cold Iron by Lyman Clive Charles. Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[70,84,53,507],"class_list":["post-1981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-andrew-plotkin","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1981"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4943,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1981\/revisions\/4943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}