{"id":222,"date":"2007-10-09T01:27:29","date_gmt":"2007-10-09T06:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/222"},"modified":"2016-07-08T18:55:56","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T01:55:56","slug":"ifcomp-2007-deadline-enchanter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/222","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2007: Deadline Enchanter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A anonymous entry in the surreal mode.  Spoilers follow the break.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been complaining a lot about games that you can&#8217;t solve without a walkthrough.  Well, here&#8217;s a game that really takes that concept seriously.  Nearly all of the game consists of transcribing sequences of commands presented to you in-game in a couple of books.  Some of these commands, such as ducking into a tunnel not mentioned in the room description, are blatantly unguessable.  Aside from examining objects, they&#8217;re pretty much the only actions you can perform, too.<\/p>\n<p>It makes some sense in context: the game itself is supposed to be a message of sorts from an imprisoned elf or alien or robot or something in the future, and the walkthrough is instructions on how to set her free before she&#8217;s executed or something.  Whether or not setting her free is actually a good idea is left open.  At any rate, given that premise, it makes sense that the imperiled captive wouldn&#8217;t waste time on making anything more than absolutely minimal implementation.  At one point a creature appears that presents you with a list of ways to interact with it; none of the verbs mentioned actually work, and the narrator apologizes for not having bothered to erase it entirely.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s all very postmodern, and enigmatic in  an <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/I_Love_Bees\">ilovebees<\/a> sort of way, but is it good?  Well, it really isn&#8217;t much of a game.  It&#8217;s kind of the opposite problem from the other walkthrough-intensive games I&#8217;ve been describing.  Getting stuck because you don&#8217;t understand things isn&#8217;t a problem here, but that&#8217;s because you&#8217;re not expected to understand anything.  Whichever way it goes, the player is deprived of the opportunity to participate in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rating: 3<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A anonymous entry in the surreal mode. 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":[84,53,182],"class_list":["post-222","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\/222","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=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3611,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions\/3611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}