IF Comp Review #2: How Prince Quisborne the Feckless Shook His Title
The author saw my last post and suggested I try his game, since it’s specifically designed to be moron-friendly (that is not actually how he described it).
After installing a TADS er… thingy and downloading it, including going into my security system, I was tired out from problem solving and took a break. I’d been using my brain for almost three minutes!
But I was greeted with a pretty screen and music, which was a nice reward.
The full instructions took about ten minutes to read, and serve as a good intro to parser in general I think. I remembered how much I hate re-reading the same description over and over (a rather essential part of parser games) and opted for the read-through.
Ah! I love the opening paragraph! The exact same humour as was clearly indicated by the title.
Love the whole first page, which starts strong and gets better (and more original) from there.
(In case it wasn’t clear, my main bias is in a highly writer-centric direction. If there ain’t good writing, I will hate it. So far, I love this.)
The author pauses a couple of times to give hints about formatting stuff, which sort of interrupts the story but as a raw beginner I love getting little bits of info juuust when I need them, and in easily-digestible fragments. Ooh, and they develop into gaming hints as well. I’m still allergic to parser (to the extent that I tense up when someone mentions a compass direction) but any moderately sane and intelligent person could easily fall in love with parser because of this game helping them along the way and giving them the option to continue the read-through or put in their own commands.
It does seem to me like a lot of text. I’m not complaining personally, it’s just that my usual experience of IF has the shortest possible bits of text followed by a decision (choice-based IF, of course). Fortunately, fun writing is the author’s strength so why not use it?
There’s some seriously excellent world-building, such as the roads being designed with living creepers to keep them harmonious to the landscape.
Still regularly making me laugh out loud.
I reached an ending (in the sense that the read-through gave it to me), which was delightfully macabre and easily undone. The “undo” button is a wonderful thing.
There’s evidence of thorough programming here, where the scene ‘remembers’ where you dropped things previously.
I just reached the end of the prologue, still enjoying the story (although I thought the paranoid king would believe his rutabagas were somehow sabotaged out of winning first place). It took me less than an hour and a half to get here (it really helps to do the read-through, of course!) so I’ll keep going. I’ve deliberately kept a timer on so I give this game two hours—no more, no less—as per contest rules (we’re meant to judge a game based on the first two hours of play if it’s a monster of a game like this one).
I’m quite delighted that the main focus of the last hour and a half has been some vegetables. I adore low stakes. I also love the prince. And the odder commands in the read-through (eg “Drown Prince”) are delightful. I sometimes find phrases a little clunky, but I think that’s part of the deliberately verbose style rather than actual grammatical clunkiness.
Every so often I know just enough to see the elegance and hard work happening behind the scenes to make the story flow nicely. There are dozens of snippets about what Prince Quisborne is doing as you poke around, and when you leave an area the game very kindly tells you that you leave certain items behind (keeping the inventory to useful items).
I can’t truly comment on the ending, of course, but this seems like a really excellent game that is also very polished and charmingly written.
Felicity Banks 
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