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Tribute: Just Another Fairy Tale
Author: Finn Rosenlov
Date: 2020
ADRIFT 5
Reviewed by
MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours
I suspect that this
may be a pseudonym, after I had a panic-inducing moment where something I posted
in the author’s forum was liked by someone who I didn’t think was an author and
who would write a game like this.
This was the first game on my
personalized list, but I thought it was charming and wanted to take it slow.
This is an ADRIFT game, which means it comes with that ADRIFT style where
precise verb noun combinations are needed and Inform’s and TADS’s automatic
feedback systems aren’t in place. So you have to poke around.
This is a
fantasy pastiche (with an especially funny moment where the game loads music by
Peter, Paul and Mary and invokes the wizard Google) where you are teleported to
another world and asked to bring a compass to a wizard.
While the
storyline resembles a fantasy teen novel, the game itself is well-adapted to
parser fans. It has traps you can fall into without knowing for sure if they are
traps, and requires careful experimentation and searching, but it also has
multiple puzzle solutions.
I had hoped to do most of the work on my own,
and asked a few early hints, but ended up heading to the walkthrough around the
bank segment. Given more time, I probably would have just left this open for a
month and poked at it.
I definitely don’t prefer ADRIFT or Quest games
for their systems, which often frustrate my gameplay style, but I have grown
accustomed to their style, and they work remarkably well for menu-based systems
(ADRIFT more than Quest).
This game was charming overall, and I had a
good time playing it.
-Polish: The eternal bane of most ADRIFT games.
+Descriptiveness: I thought the game was well-described.
+Interactivity: I
was often frustrated, but when I took it very slowly, it was fun.
+Emotional
impact: I found it charming
+Would I play again? Why not? From the other
scores I can see this early on, I might be in the minority, but I got a kick out
of this game.
Reviewed by Mike Russo
Much like Hansel and Gretel, this one needs a bit more
time in the oven, I fear.
The overall setting and structure for JAFT are
nothing close to original – the player character is a ten-year-old who’s
contacted by a wizard and transported to a fantasy land to save it from a wicked
queen – but some good old tropes are good and old for a reason. Entering the
world is at first like entering a warm bath, as you pick clean a homely cottage
in the woods and then enter a dark forest for some light adventuring. The
writing is undistinguished, but fits this high-fantasy story with a pre-teen
protagonist just fine.
There are a few things that distinguish JAFT from
the countless other stories with similar premises. First, there’s a note of
whimsy and humor – I’m thinking especially of the puzzle involving the trolls
(they’re from Poland, so of course when they’re turned to stone by the sun, they
transform into poles made of petrified wood) and a punny bit of business
involving a magic clock. Several puzzles also have alternate solutions or offer
multiple paths through the game, which is very helpful given that I found the
difficulty level of the game quite high.
On the negative side, there are
two primary issues I had with JAFT that wind up reinforcing each other. Many
puzzles rely on what I’d call pixel-hunting design in a graphic adventure –
there are many progression-critical objects that can only be found by
methodically examining every single word that’s mentioned in a description, and
even some that aren’t (for the former issue, I’m thinking primarily of the sprig
of thyme, where you need to examine one specific piece of the hedge despite
there being no reason to think to look there; for the latter, all of the hidden
spots on walls that don’t draw any attention to themselves).
The related
issue is that “near-miss” solutions don’t wind up generating helpful nudges to
the right track, but rather parser confusion. I had to go to the walkthrough to
get through the aforementioned bit with the trolls, because something I was
expecting to be there wasn’t, and the responses to trying to interact with it
didn’t lead me in the right direction, even though what was going on should have
been obvious to the player character (that is, I kept trying to X TROLLS or X
STATUES to no real effect, even though apparently there were a bunch of
undescribed giant troll-shaped wooden poles lying in the clearing). Dialogue
with characters similarly felt very fiddly – there was one puzzle (talking then
listening to the wind to get the dragon’s name) that I couldn’t get to work even
when I was trying to just type in the walkthrough commands. And there were
several guess the verb/guess the noun issues that stymied progress.
Combined, these two issues meant I felt like I was groping my way through JAFT,
unclear on what I should be doing or how I should be doing it or whether I was
close to a solution or miles off. Again, I think the basic concept is solid, and
some of the puzzles do have some promise, but there’s some significant polishing
to be done to make the experience of playing the game fit the charming, winsome
mood the story’s trying to create.
Reviewed by Mike Spivey
(Here be spoilers – light ones in the third paragraph and
getting more explicit starting in the fifth paragraph.)
Two old-school
text adventures in a row! Much of what I said about the last game I played,
Return to Castle Coris, could also be said about Just Another Fairy Tale: large
(well, larger than most IFComp games), somewhat sparsely-implemented, lots of
puzzles, fantasy world. Just Another Fairy Tale has more of a plot than does
Return to Castle Coris, but both feature an eclectic mix of traditional fantasy
elements. (For what it’s worth, the largest game I’ve played in IFComp this
year, Little Girl in Monsterland, also contains an eclectic mix of fantasy
characters and locations.)
With Just Another Fairy Tale we also have a
traditional fantasy plot: An evil queen rules the land, and a good wizard has
reached out to you in a dream to ask for your help. You’re only a child, but you
set out on a quest to return a magic compass to the wizard and save the land.
An interesting early aspect of Just Another Fairy Tale is that it explicitly
acknowledges Tolkien’s influence in establishing this sort of setup as a
standard fantasy plot. The first dangerous area you enter is actually called
“Mirkwood,” after a huge forest in The Hobbit. In addition, some of the
characters you meet in this forest are straight out of The Hobbit, the
descriptions of the trees sound like the descriptions of Mirkwood in The Hobbit
or the Old Forest in The Lord of the Rings, and the magic rope you begin the
game with has the same properties as the elven rope in The Lord of the Rings.
Just Another Fairy Tale isn’t Tolkien fan fiction, though; besides Mirkwood and
the rope I didn’t see anything that reminded me explicitly of Tolkien’s work. In
fact, later there’s a very non-Tolkien reference to a certain dragon in American
pop culture.
Players should be aware that you can lock yourself out of
victory in this game, although sometimes when I thought I had locked myself out
of victory I had merely just made things harder for myself. (This I discovered
after checking the walkthrough.)
The puzzles aren’t too hard; generally
when I got stuck the problem was that I hadn’t carefully examined everything in
my location. The primary exception to that was the solution to getting across
the river, which requires making an object that isn’t there. I generally don’t
think of MAKE (something) as a solution to a puzzle in a parser game. I’m pretty
sure that’s because I’m so used to the Inform world model, which generally only
allows you to verb nouns that you can see or touch or that are otherwise “in
scope” in some sense. Getting across the river in Just Another Fairy Tale is not
an unfair puzzle, especially since it’s clued by a phrase with a double-meaning,
but I think a lot of players used to Inform games will have trouble with it.
Speaking of game design systems, this is the second Adrift game in a row
that I’ve played, and once again I found myself struggling with the Adrift world
model and parser. For example, I couldn’t put water in the wineskin when it was
in my backpack (reasonable enough), but GET WINESKIN failed; the game told me I
was already carrying the wineskin (and I was, in a sense – it was in my
backpack). I had to drop the backpack and then take the wineskin out of it in
order to fill it with water. A more serious problem for me, as I’m starting to
realize, is that Adrift just doesn’t parse like Inform does. For example, one of
the puzzles in Just Another Fairy Tale requires you to SHOOT (something) WITH
PEBBLES. This works just fine when “something” is the right thing to solve the
puzzle. However, everything else I tried to shoot with the pebbles resulted in a
response of “I don’t know what you want to do with the pebbles.” That had led me
to believe, mistakenly, that SHOOT isn’t a verb understood by the game, since
that’s what would have been the case with Inform. (In Inform, any verb you want
the player to use tends to be given its own custom default response. So it’s
generally quite clear when the game doesn’t understand a particular verb.) Thus,
I’m learning that when I play an Adrift game I need to come at it with some
different expectations about the way the game responds. (I now think this was
also at the root of some of my difficulties with Return to Castle Coris, the
Adrift game I played right before this one.)
I also noticed that the set
of authors and testers of Return to Castle Coris and Just Another Fairy Tale
appears to be a set with only three people in it, all of whom seem to prefer
Adrift when creating their games. That’s fine, of course, but I’d suggest that
for subsequent games they consider recruiting some additional testers who are
used to other systems like Inform, testers who could help them see how lots of
IFComp players not accustomed to Adrift will approach playing their games.
(Perhaps they tried and nobody offered to help; I know finding testers can be
difficult. There is, though, at least one Inform 7 author who is generally eager
to test anything. I will not put him on the spot by naming him here, but placing
a request for testing help on intfiction.org might produce a response. Also, if
I have free time I might be willing to test.) I think this would not only help
players like me understand more how Adrift works; it would also help Adrift
games be better-appreciated by a wider collection of players.
Two more
specific comments on Just Another Fairy Tale: There are some places where the
implementation could be better, places in which I don’t think the problem is the
parser. (For example, CLIMB ROPE at one point gave me the response “You are
currently holding on to the end of the rope. Maybe you should tie it to
something sturdy.” Then TIE ROPE TO HOOK produced “You are not holding the
rope.”)
Finally, the ultimate punishment in Just Another Fairy Tale fell
rather flat for me. Since I’m a math professor, being forced to do mathematics
for a long time is rather like throwing Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch. 🙂
In sum, I think fans of older-style fantasy IF with lots of puzzles will
like Just Another Fairy Tale, especially those who are comfortable with Adrift’s
parser and world model.
Reviewed by Anssi
This adventure starts pleasantly enough. An old man,
presumably a wizard, visits the hero of the story in the middle of the night,
and after this visit the hero is not sure if he was awake or dreaming. But when
he wakes up in the morning, he is in different surroundings from his usual one.
He has been transported to a magical kingdom. When the wizard appeared to him
earlier, he asked him to save the kingdom from an evil queen, so that is
obviously the quest he must embark on. The wizard we encountered in the
beginning helps us along the way.
Playing was often not that smooth:
there were some places where the walkthrough had to be consulted because of
guess-the-verb issues (for example only ‘remove’ is accepted as a solution in
one puzzle; ‘take’ does not work). Sometimes, even the walkthrough does not work
properly. For example in the forest we hear voices coming from the east, and the
solution, according to the walkthrough, is to listen - fair and simple enough.
But listening at that location does not bring the game forward, we have to go
round to the south of the said location, where no voices are described as being
heard, and then listening there triggers the plot forward. There was no clear
reason for this. There was also an incongruity with the magic rope: . There were
some language-related puzzles which were not readily intuitional: . There were
also some linguistic errors here and there, mainly with the 3rd person -s
appearing or not appearing in the wrong places. I stopped playing when I had
been caught in a prison cell (with math books), and even if managing to . For
some reason, going “in” in the prison cell is possible, and when looking , the
room description is “nothing special”. You have to come out again to be back in
the cell. Going up in the prison cell, I’m suddenly “Inside the snake” (!) which
was not at all referred to previously, and going down again I am back at the
prison cell. This snake is not also referred to in the walkthrough at all, as
far as I can understand, it seemed like a leftover code that was not intended to
be in the final game.
The puzzles in the game were mostly fair, and the
story charming enough, but due to the various rough spots, guess-the-verb issues
and incongruities, the gameplay was not as ideal as it could have been. 6
Reviewed by
Stian
This is a classic style fantasy adventure, seemingly written for young
children, but much too hard for me. I picture the boy from Time Bandits as the
protagonist, taken from reality and inserted into a fictitious world filled with
magic and fraught with danger, but nothing a young boy can’t handle.
The
reason I did not get very far in two hours is mainly down to the verbs. Perhaps
Adrift has a different set of standard verbs than Inform and Tads; a lot of the
ones I’m accustomed to were not recognised, and when I finally gave up and had a
look at the walkthrough, the solutions surprised me. I was reminded of the
challenges Jason Dyer writes about when playing very old games 3. In these
games, you need to forget any expectation you have about which verbs will work
and which will not. In a sense, Inform games have made me very comfortable with
a certain way of interacting with parsers, and I’m not really equipped with the
lateral mindset for something completely different.
As far as I came, I
found the story to be quite okay. It’s very stereotypical, but also cute in a
way. The moments in which it shines are whenever it is obvious that you are a
little boy, and a rather obedient one at that. A feature I enjoyed – which
sometimes was necessary, but only occasionally implemented – was being able to
examine elements over a distance. In the end I think I might have enjoyed it
more if I had consulted the walkthrough earlier and gotten a bit further, though
that would also have been counter to my instincts.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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