{"id":7039,"date":"2022-07-25T22:30:44","date_gmt":"2022-07-26T05:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=7039"},"modified":"2022-07-25T22:30:44","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T05:30:44","slug":"parsercomp-2022-of-their-shadows-deep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/7039","title":{"rendered":"ParserComp 2022: Of Their Shadows Deep"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oh, this one’s nice. Pastoral and poetic in tone, its main mechanic, the core of all its puzzles, is literary-style riddles — riddles that, once answered, turn into the things their answers name, but are still somehow made of words. That’s the power of abstraction you get from text — although the same transformations are also powered by concrete poetry<\/em>, words arranged to make shapes, sometimes in very clever ways. (Admirably, the author has taken special care to make this not interfere with screen readers, for those who use them.)<\/p>\n

That makes it all sound very cerebral, but the heart of the story — and its inspiration, according to the endnotes — is that the riddles are a metaphor for the struggles of an old woman with dementia, losing her vocabulary. Solving them is a sort of quest to help her preserve what she’s losing. It puts a layer of sadness on every puzzle, and nicely connects theme and mechanics.<\/p>\n

Riddles are perilous territory for adventure games, because of how they can stop a game dead: where a well-implemented object-based puzzle can give you more cues about what you’re supposed to be doing with each near miss, riddles tend to be all-or-nothing. Fortunately, the riddles here are easy, and on top of that, the in-game hints are pretty good.<\/p>\n

In addition, the prose describing the environment is delightful, filled with randomized wildlife. I think this is the most satisfactory game I’ve seen in this Comp so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh, this one’s nice. Pastoral and poetic in tone, its main mechanic, the core of all its puzzles, is literary-style riddles — riddles that, once answered, turn into the things their answers name, but are still somehow made of words. That’s the power of abstraction you get from text — although the same transformations are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,721,722],"class_list":["post-7039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-parsercomp","tag-parsercomp-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7039","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=7039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7040,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7039\/revisions\/7040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}