Still trying to get caught up in these posts. Next up is a piece by newcomer Nestor I. McNaugh, concerning an arrogant gentleman thief in a modern setting. (It actually took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy setting, as the first element of the setting you hear about is a Thieves’ Guild.) Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What we basically have here is a nice little absurd-puzzles comedy, although it’s too easy to get stuck, and even has some deliberate guess-the-verb moments. I resorted to the built-in hints twice. <\/p>\n
The endnotes comment on the game’s inspiration: apparently it was intended to be organized around the concept of making seemingly-important things into “scenery objects” that the player isn’t allowed to interact with. That is, you’d try to perform an action, be told that the object of that action is something you don’t need to refer to, and try to figure out a way to perform the action without referring to that object. This wasn’t really carried out to a noticable degree, though, and it’s just as well. The main relic of the idea is that there are an awful lot of objects that have lengthy text descriptions ending in a statement to the effect that it’s unimportant and you don’t need to refer to it. This comes off as fourth-wall breaking. Objects are necessarily described from the player character’s POV, so the description is in the PC’s voice (if the PC has a strong voice, anyway, which he does in this case), but it’s merged with the “You don’t need to refer to that”, which is more in the nature of a system message — an observation about the limitations of the world model, made by the game system and addressed to the player without any fictional characters needing to be involved. Come to think of it, system messages of this sort are often put in the PC’s voice, but somehow that doesn’t seem as meta as mixing them with actual game content.<\/p>\n
Rating: 4<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Still trying to get caught up in these posts. Next up is a piece by newcomer Nestor I. McNaugh, concerning an arrogant gentleman thief in a modern setting. (It actually took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy setting, as the first element of the setting you hear about is a Thieves’ […]<\/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":[84,53,182],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","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=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3606,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/3606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}