The Stack

Bill Powell gives us a twist on Sleeping Beauty, sending a more typical adventure game hero to lift the curse after Prince Charming fails. Spoilers follow the break.

One of the oldest and most persistent features of the adventure game genre is the advice to “take everything that isn’t nailed down”, because you never know what might be needed for a puzzle later. This game is based around hanging a lampshade on that: the player character is a compulsive collector with a house overflowing with garage-sale clutter. The starting inventory even includes a doorknob collection. In fact, he’s so compulsive about it that picking up a discarded beer stein in the first room sends him into a collection mania in which he automatically tries to pick up everything in every room he enters and refuses to drop it. (This reminds me a lot of this old Usenet post.)

I like the concept here, but the implementation is lacking. In packrat frenzy mode, he tries to pick up some (but not all!) obvious backdrop items, such as the grand staircase in the castle’s vestibule, and you’re told of his unsuccessful attempt to pick up such items every turn you spend in their presence. In one case these failure messages were the first way I became aware of an object not mentioned in the room description, leaving me thinking “Huh? Painting? What painting?” The game really could have used more testing, and this is just one example of that. A few other examples I noticed:

• You can’t refer to the doorknob collection by the phrase “doorknob collection”, even though that’s what the game calls it.
• You start the game carrying a lit lantern in your pack.
• There’s a chest in a guest room that’s described as being full of pantaloons, but if you search it, you’re told that it’s empty.

Little things, but they add up. There’s one part that I don’t know whether to describe as a bug or not: if you bring that chest into any other room, it moves back to the guest room as soon as you leave. Now, one the one hand, it’s hard to see how this effect could have been produced accidentally. On the other hand, there’s no obvious reason for a wooden chest, even an enchanted teleporting wooden chest, to have a teleport-when-unobserved trigger on it. But who knows, maybe it’s being carried back to where it belongs by shy gnomes.

I’m afraid I can’t really say much about the game’s content: I didn’t see most of it, having given up after an hour and a half because I couldn’t solve even a single puzzle. I tried the author’s walkthrough toward the end, but the first puzzle solved therein — curing the player character’s collection mania by making a sleeping kitchen boy more comfortable — just convinced me that I was going to need the walkthrough for everything, which makes the whole exercise pointless. One of the remarkable things about interactive fiction, in contrast to static media, is that it can actually require the audience to understand it. A reader of a book can read the whole thing and still miss the author’s point entirely, and may not even realize this, but players of adventure games can’t make it to the end without having their understanding of the gameworld and how it works — which is to say, their understanding of the author — repeatedly tested. Bridging the gap between player and author is to some extent the point of IF, and it requires effort — collaborative effort, in which the player tries to understand and the author tries to be understood. When that effort fails, we say that the game requires “reading the author’s mind”. That’s what happened here.

Rating: 3