Sunday, April 5, 2009
Spring Thing 2009 reviews: A Flustered Duck - Jim Aikin
This is a review of a game in the 2009 Spring Thing Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want to read spoilers. You have been warned.
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A Flustered Duck
Author: Jim Aikin
First of all, I'd like to nominate this for Best Title of 2009. No, there is no XYZZY for that. But there should be one, solely so this could win. I mean, the mental image! The assonance! The patterning-after-other-titles! (I don't have a concise phrase for that.)
Now then. A Flustered Duck is defiantly old-school. The overarching plot is somewhat similar to "Lost Pig" from 2007 - catch your duck Mabel, who has flown the coop - but in between point A and point B there is a big puzzlefest pastiche. There's a lot of vegetation to explore. There's a town square with shops and a lot of stationary shopkeepers. There's a troll guarding a bridge. There's scoring.
But I kind of like old-school games, and not many people make them these days. There was a whole slew of them about a decade ago, but lately? Not really a slew at all. Berrost's Challenge from last year's comp wanted to be like this, but its utter contempt for the player got in the way.
And, now that I mention it, this was better than about half the games in that comp. The implementation, for the most part, is solid - a few things like missed plurals and sense responses, but it's usually more surprising when a game doesn't have them. There are NPCs, but they're hardly the point; they're there to facilitate the puzzles, which run the gamut from cool (the surfboard) to less cool (a lot of the fetch quests) to a bit unintuitive (I'm still having a hard time picturing a poodle in a glass jar, even given a small poodle and large jar.)
You can't fault the game for not knowing what it's about, though. It's right there in the >ABOUT text: "If you're looking for a game set in a believable world or a game that tells a serious story, you'll need to look elsewhere. "A Flustered Duck" is about having fun. I had fun writing it, and I hope you'll have fun playing it." And for the most part, it succeeded. I was entertained throughout. A few aspects, however, were decidedly un-fun. Namely:
- My love for old school games does not extend to mazes. See, mazes aren't fun. Even if they're fake - and only one of them was. Even if there's a way to turn it from an impossible maze into a possible maze - and even then it's still a maze. Mazes aren't fun. Mapping mazes isn't fun. Looking up the solution in the walkthrough isn't fun. In order for a maze to work in 2009, it has to be absolutely crash-bang-fantastic and innovative. You know, fun. The crystal maze was just a maze. And mazes aren't fun.
- Ditto on random-chance puzzles (the otter). It's a cool idea, if only to have a game of Three Card Monte that doesn't end in a bankruptcy Aesop, but having a 2/3 chance of failure turns the puzzle into undo-until-you-get-it-right. I don't think this was intended behavior. It's also not fun.
- Riding Bessie the first time is interesting. Tethering Bessie the first time is pretty fun, as is finding new and exciting things to tether her to. Having to track her down, untie her, vehicle-ize her, tie her up, and dismount whenever you want to move between major areas of the game gets very tedious very fast. With the amount of times players will realistically be heading across the bridge, it becomes spectacularly tedious. I really wanted there to be a way to automate this - kind of like how Nightfall has the automated pathfinding, or Violet automatically returns dropped items, such as the book, to their original places. (To cull from last year's comp...)
It won't make the game easier to leave it out. At this point, the player's already solved the Bessie-and-tethering puzzle. He or she's probably already found out what happens if you abandon Bessie. It's just more steps. And they definitely aren't fun.
And some more general notes:
- A lot of the early search puzzles, if anything, are too easy. There's so little scenery implemented - not that that's necessarily bad, per se, it's just that kind of game - that whenever there's a patch of bushes or pile of junk mentioned, you know there's something hidden. The search-and-find wears off dramatically in the middle and end game, but it's worth pointing out. (I suspect some of this might be a relic of this being a First I7 Game.)
- While the writing was more than adequate - I've played too many atrociously written games to say anything less - it often missed chances to go the extra mile from amusing to funny. A lot of the descriptions are generic. And while this isn't horrible, and in a game of this size, every bit of text can hardly expected to be a knee-slapper, it seemed like there could be room for improvement.
Don't get the impression that I didn't enjoy this. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and there are certainly plenty, plenty of worse examples of the genre. It set out to be entertaining, and it succeeded. And above all, it has obvious time and effort devoted to it. If only I could say that about everything. I do think a second release would be welcome, to address some of the little buggish things.
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