http://ift.tt/2eDqXFg
The title says it all: one puzzle, 16 solutions. You're encouraged to find them all through the liberal use of achievements (one per ending), "death-hints" (fail and you get a relevant clue), unlockables (special bonus features that unlock when you've achieved a given number of endings), even "New Game+" (when you replay, the game remembers any tricky steps you executed on a previous play-through and skips them for you). The puzzle you are solving involves a location and object-based world model, you have an inventory, options are disabled if you're not holding the right thing, characters move around, in short its using Twine to replicate a parser-based text adventure, which is a very impressive feat. So why not go the whole hog and use a parser? I believe because everything has been designed to encourage replay: even seeing a greyed out option to "stake the vampire with the drinking straws" tells the player that (a) there are drinking straws, (b) they might be useful, (c) staking might be a possibility, even if the option itself is patently ridiculous. With a parser-based approach, the player would be much more likely to quit before seeing all 16 endings, having exhausted their head-space of possibilities. Yes, this worked for me, despite my hatred of all things vampire (sorry, Darkiss) and all things McDonalds (sorry, Fast Food Rockers). It's a true puzzler, requiring lateral thinking and creative use of every element around you, of a type that generally doesn't exist in the choice-based arena, yet it retains all the instant accessibility of that format. Detectiveland is also bridging that gap from a different angle, and I expect both to perform well in this competition.
Gamebook blogs
http://ift.tt/2eDqXFg
via Planet Interactive Fiction http://planet-if.com/
October 22, 2016 at 04:27AM
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.