The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.

Here’s a retro one. I suppose most people think IF in general is retro, but some is more retro than others. We’ve got a captive princess in an oddly empty castle in a forest, a big map made mostly of filler rooms with window-dressing descriptions, some maze-like stuff, and some utterly standard first-generation puzzle design (like hiding an object in a container to keep it from being stolen, or getting a guard drunk so you can steal his keys). But there’s an interesting puzzle or two mixed in, and the princess actually has to be led out of the castle once found, which is far from standard for this sort of thing. Also, the ending text seemed way too long for the era that it seemed to be imitating.

Imitating… I noticed on first playing it that the intro text says that it’s a new port of an earlier game, which, if true, makes it questionable whether it’s eligible to be entered in the Comp. (Entries don’t strictly have to be newly-written, but they are supposed to be previously unreleased.) So I was considering the possibility that this claim was a lie and the game is a faux-remake like Infil-Traitor from the 2000 Comp. But on a second look, I see that it claims the original was written in 2002, when this style of design was already retro.