| Home | About Me | |
|
|
DELRON
|
Return to Camelot Reviews
Author: Finn Rosenløv (Po. Prune)
Date: 2011
ADRIFT 5.0
Reviewed by Sam Kabo Ashwell
Wait, wait, another detective rendered in genre-failing
ungainly prose? Was there a sale on?
We're in Wacky No Fourth Wall Land; the narrator speaks directly to us,
reference jokes take physical form and march into the game. The basic framing is
Summoned By Wacky Wizard, a trope I loathe with a scorching intensity. The
Merlin character is lifted unrepentantly from The Sword in the Stone, and
similar liftings happen every five minutes.
This would be more acceptable if it were funnier; the style of humour is
generally of the Inept Hero Slapstick variety, which is not trivial to do well.
I tried repeatedly to interact with the file folders individually, then gave up
the effort only to check the walkthrough and discover that it wanted me to GET
FOLDERS. Pulling a whole armful of folders out of a drawer is a pretty unnatural
action unless you know that you're looking for something under there -- which
the author does, of course, but I don't. Next the narrator declares that I
should take a nap, but SLEEP and NAP aren't recognised, and only sitting in the
office chair (not the easy chair) will trigger said nap.
The obligatory entry of the femme fatale. At this point, I've played so many
games in which the narrator leers while affecting not to that a description in
which the PC straightforwardly checks someone out is almost refreshing. However:
a) the word 'caress' gets used. Twice. It's generally not a great idea to reuse
the same figure of speech within the same paragraph, and this goes double for a
word like 'caress'. Once may seem like an accident; twice looks grabby.
b) she's smiling. A really big, genuine smile. This doesn't say femme fatale to
me; it doesn't even say 'someone dealing with problems major enough to hire a
detective.'
...and then things start going downhill as soon as she starts talking. Oh well.
The best bit is "Her chest moves violently as she speaks, almost stuttering out
the words." I've never seen anyone's chest move violently just from talking, so
now I'm not sure whether she has a heart condition or tits of zero-gravity
custard. (Admittedly, it turns out that she's not an actual woman, but an Igor
under an illusion spell.)
Again, I'm not sure if the badly misleading response here is Adrift's fault or
the author's.
>talk to woman
You don't have to [talk to a character] Just use [say hello or hi to character]
in order to start a conversation.
>hello woman
Sorry, I don't understand that command.
>hello
Sorry, I don't understand that command.
>hello to woman
Sorry, I don't understand that command.
>hi
>ask woman about herself
She looks at you, then leans over the desk and begins to speak...
It is not an easy thing to be fair to a game that you know is going to continue
to suck. Another thing that makes this difficult: native ADRIFT 5 doesn't seem
to allow text selection at all. (I know, I know, still in development, and a lot
of Z-code / Glulx interpreters are kind of crap at this too, but at least you
can get at the text with a little hassle.)
This fails at building confidence in a very old-school manner: it's only
interested in world building in a theme-park kind of way, and it doesn't seem to
think that giving the player any direction is the author's job. It's the kind of
game in which the first part of every puzzle is working out whether it's a
puzzle at all. There's a certain amount of wacky exuberance that might appeal to
people who liked, say, Jacaranda Jim, but there isn't anything like a modern
level of craft. There are testers credited, but the writing and implementation
still have numerous, basic errors. Of the three paintings, for instance, which
are the only lead I really have, I can't get into one because I don't know how
to refer to it. Looking at the walkthrough, the first thing I'm meant to do
involves looking closely at scenery and then interacting with parts of it, which
I've already been discouraged from doing by the file folders: I really have no
confidence that the author's going to implement things at this level of detail
and in a way I can refer to, so I don't have much inclination to poke around.
Even were this solidly-implemented, it would not be the sort of game that I
would have very much interest in; as it stands, it's a 3.
Reviewed by Emily Short
Return to Camelot is a fantasy pastiche game loosely
combining hardboiled detective tropes with Arthurian characters. It’s fairly
sizable, and I ran out of time before completing it (though others might not).
As of ADRIFT 5, ADRIFT games can now be over the web in a WebRunner. This is a
terrific development, and I’m delighted Campbell Wild’s putting the work into
it.
The downside is that everything is still new and the runner is still a bit
quirky (I ran into a minor but irritating display bug that Campbell immediately
fixed, but it meant I needed to restart the game at one point to take advantage
of the revision). Also, there’s a significant delay in responding to commands
because there’s a reload of (as far as I can tell) the whole page every time you
act; and if you go away from the game for a while, your session appears to time
out. The cumulative effect of all that is that I spent much of my permitted
comp-judging time replaying the opening to Return to Camelot (because of the
bug, because I got interrupted while playing and had to start over, and because
playing is just slower than it would be on a local interpreter). So I didn’t get
nearly all the way through it and had to go to the walkthrough.
Design is fairly wide-open, in the portions I saw — it’s possible to wander
around quite a bit without knowing where to look first. That’s not always a bad
thing, but I would have welcomed a slightly more vigorous pace in the early
midgame. Then again when there is hinting, it is extremely direct, even
aggressive. At one point during the early game, a message popped up saying
“Narrator interrupting:…” with a clue about what I ought to do next to trigger
forward progress. At another point, an NPC directly challenged me to do
something I didn’t particularly want to do, and for which I was then immediately
punished — but the story wasn’t going to go forward until I did it.
This felt awkward. A tighter design would have let me find the intended path a
little more naturally, without this kind of fourth-wall-breaking intervention.
The writing also could use a good thorough trimming; there are sentences that
look like hedges gone untended for a generation. (More specifics about both
those issues follow the spoiler space.)
Overall, from what I saw (the latter part all from the walkthrough), this is a
fairly middle-of-the-road offering in terms of puzzle difficulty and
implementation depth. The setting doesn’t really grab me, being chiefly a
compilation of bits borrowed from other works, rather than a freshly imagined or
re-imagined world. So it falls at the low end of my recommended scale, I’d say:
it’s playable and has some amusing moments, but there are an assortment of craft
issues, and it didn’t grab me with a compelling, coherent vision.
So in the first part of the game — which for circumstantial reasons I replayed I
think four or possibly five times, so I became intimately familiar with it —
there are a couple of critical triggers to move the story forward. First you
have to sit in your chair to trigger the appearance of your visitor; then you
have to kiss her in order to get kidnapped into Merlin’s lair. Using triggers to
ratchet the story forward is a time-honored technique in games, and it’s useful,
but the aesthetic goal is for the player not to experience any stuck periods or
to have to go on a hunt for a trigger, and also not to notice the arbitrariness
of the triggering event. In this case, I did both: I spent a bunch of time
poking around my office looking for something useful to do with the painting
after it was delivered until the narrative voice told me to sit in the chair
(and then I sat in the easy chair, which didn’t trigger anything, before trying
the office chair).
So there are a couple of points here about triggers.
1) It’s good if they’re connected to something the player has a strong intrinsic
reason to try even without knowing there’s a trigger there. Sitting in the
office chair isn’t necessarily the obvious choice for the player, given that
there are appealing objects to explore and a mystery about the freshly delivered
painting.
2) Sometimes it’s helpful to have more than one trigger to set off the same
event, or to use a count of related actions, rather than just a single action,
to spring the trigger. Assuming the aim is to let the player look around his
office for a little while and get acquainted with the protagonist’s semi-loserdom,
but to move the narrative along before he gets too bored or stuck, it might be
reasonable to trigger off, say, interacting with three of the narratively
meaningful objects in the room (out of a somewhat larger total set — say the
painting, gun, whiskey, files in the desk drawer, phone).
3) If at all possible, it’s cool to disguise the arbitrariness of all this by
making the trigger and the triggered event feel somehow related. E.g.: give the
player the fake goal of making his office look a bit less pathetic; then as he
tries to carry this out, via any of about a half dozen legitimate methods (like
say scattering the files on his desk), have the beautiful woman walk in and
mockingly notice him in the middle of this embarrassment, but move the plot
along. Now we may not have agency in the classic sense that the player
accomplishes what he wanted to accomplish — on the contrary, his actions make
him look like a bit of a dork in her eyes — but there’s a narrative connection
between what he was doing before and what happened after.
As to the writing, here’s what I mean about trimming (and while I’ve picked an
extreme example, a lot of the writing shows similar characteristics):
Peacocks, pecking for food, wander around a marble bench which is placed under
the protective shade of a small almond tree and a low stone wall surrounds the
garden on two sides, the castle wall making out the third and the wall with the
arch which you walked through to the east, makes out the fourth.
There are too many ideas in this sentence. The structure means the player may
need to read it more than once to work out the layout that’s being described,
and by the end the interesting details about the almond tree and peacocks may be
already forgotten. Besides this, much of the description has a dutiful quality:
> x stone
The stone is light gray, not that it matters, but that’s the color. It’s
polished smooth and is actually quite decorative. There’s some writing on the
side, only a few sentences written in glowing letters.
I don’t know about you, but I actually felt a little sorry for the author as I
read this. It sounds like a cry for help. “Oh, fine, the player wants me to
describe this stone… I guess I have to pick a color for it. It’s rock-colored,
okay?”
Many many objects in the game are described mechanically with reference to their
color, material (lots of oak things), or general level of attractiveness. The
result is often a kind of modifier soup: too many adjectives and adverbs,
sentences that go on too long about things that aren’t distinctive or important,
and a real wall-of-text experience for the player on some moves. The
descriptions would be much stronger — more memorable, more interesting, easier
to parse — if the author gave us half or a third as many details, but made sure
each one was something that mattered.
What matters about this stone (other than the already-mentioned presence of
Excalibur)? It has glowing letters on it. That’s the interesting thing. That’s
the first thing I’d notice if I were checking out a magic-inscribed rock. Lead
with that, describe it evocatively, and I guarantee the player won’t be thinking
“okay, sure, glowing letters, likely magic, has Excalibur stuck into the top of
it, but what shade of gray is it?”
Reviewed by TempestDash
Sequels are a tricky thing in any medium. You’ve got to
balance the urge to assume everyone has experienced the prior work with the
desire to simply reiterate the first work in case anyone missed such a seminal
piece. You can never please everyone.
Return to Camelot is a sequel to Po. Prune’s earlier work ‘Camelot.’ I did not
play the prior piece, so I’m not sure what parts of this game are supposed to
feel familiar to me. The introduction threw me for a spin because I didn’t even
know this was a sequel at first so the references to having ‘come back’ from
Camelot were strange, and descriptions of Merlin’s laboratory as a familiar
place (despite the game starting in a modern day office building) were
confusing. I had to stop playing and research Po. Prune before I could mentally
move forward.
Once I did, however, the game dropped me into Camelot (as the title implies) and
saddled me with a quest to protect the lovely Queen Guinevere, despite being
dressed as a squire that nobody knows. The castle and grounds are fairly well
implemented, with about a dozen rooms as depicted on the included map (a feelie,
if you will), but I quickly ran into a dead end, unable to figure out what to do
to gain an audience with the Queen. I consulted the included Walkthrough. And
while I saw what to do, I was baffled as to how I was supposed to figure it out
on my own.
I’m an atypical IF player, I think. If anything, I represent the generation of
players that the old school masters are trying to court these days. I know that
historically the adventurer’s mantra is “look at, look under, and loot”, I
certainly did so when I played point-and-click adventure games as a high
schooler, but today I just find it so tiresome. Why must the player do the work
of tying together the puzzles in a game – certainly in one with such a
story-heavy setup such as this one? Is it so much to ask that when I look back
on my log, that all the actions appear as if they evolved from the actions
prior?
Instead, what I found myself doing is suspiciously manhandling the mantle of a
fireplace to reveal a secret passage to a ‘Panic Room’ (a concept I find
suspicious in Arthurian legends, maybe this is explained in the previous game?)
that initially appears empty until you figure out the trick to reveal a
painting. And then…
The key problem here is that in absence of any real telegraphing of what you
need to do next, you need to roam the castle inspecting everything. And, as
mentioned before, the castle is big. A dozen rooms filled with miscellany is
nothing to balk at. As I moved through the walkthrough, I started to get an idea
of what was going on, but it was never obvious enough to me that I felt I would
have gotten it on my own.
The room and item descriptions are generally there, but they are frightfully
verbose. Brevity is the soul of wit and this game could do with some cutting of
the fat. Room descriptions are easily too big and become a wall of text whenever
you change rooms. Item descriptions are sometimes lengthy, but generally not.
Characters sometimes get paragraphs and sometimes (like with Guards) get only a
few lines. NPCs, by the way, stay put throughout the whole game, including a
couple of enemies that really shouldn’t have been hanging around given their
role.
Finally, the game is really missing a strong voice. In the initial scene, where
you are in your office in modern times, the room and item descriptions are
quirky and unique (although sometimes that means unfunny) but all that fades as
soon as you reach Camelot, becoming a more traditional Zorkian style of
description (only longer). I feel like this is a missed opportunity. Providing a
strong voice for the protagonist could have allowed details about the prior game
to sneak in and give new players the feeling of legacy. As it is, it’s just
dull.
Ultimately, Return to Camelot is a potentially good game that is lacking polish.
Descriptions need to be trimmed to their essential elements, given a bit more
life to them. Required actions need to be better hinted so the player isn’t
forced to wander aimless through a large map. Finally, I just didn’t feel
properly invested in this game. The story has you suddenly acquire a magical
painting (where did it come from?), then mystically pulled in during a
conversation with a woman (what was her deal?) only to be told your presence was
a mistake, and then given a really critical task with no equipment or direction
on how to accomplish it. There are a lot of games where amnesia is given to the
player character to explain their unfamiliarity with their environments. This is
the opposite, where no amount of knowledge could have helped or added to the
player character’s plight, which gave me feeling of helplessness. If ANYONE
could have substituted for me, why is it important that I do anything?
Not recommended.
Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt
And it’s another private detective in novel circumstances! Seriously, if this
hasn’t been established as a distinct sub-genre already, this Comp alone
provides enough instances to do the job.
The novel circumstances this time around: a minion of Merlin transports you back
in time to the court of King Arthur. There are numerous mentions of your
previous visit, so I’m assuming that this game is a sequel to another one that I
haven’t played. Your job this time around is to protect Guinevere from
kidnappers, although you do a miserable job of it and presumably have to rescue
her afterward. Why Launcelot isn’t on the job, I don’t know. Rescuing Guinevere
from kidnappers was pretty much his thing back in Chretien de Troyes’ day.
Apart from the opening in your office, the entire game, or as much as I saw of
it, takes place on the grounds of Arthur’s castle. There’s some nice magic that
works by discoverable rules, and a couple of secret passages, although one of
them is confusingly mentioned in a room description before you find it. This may
be a symptom of a general problem with things that should be displayed
conditionally ignoring their conditions; I noticed a number of things mentioned
multiple times in room descriptions as well.
I wish I could report on just how the whole gumshoe-in-Camelot idea is developed
here, but I didn’t really get very far. I found it very hard to even get started
on this due to guess-the-conversation-topic problems. When you initially arrive
in Merlin’s tower, you’re locked in with no ability to exit until you ask Merlin
about “JOB”, and while there is a nudge in that direction in the voluminous
output text, it wasn’t nearly strong enough for me. I got past that by means of
a walkthrough, only to find similar problems later on. Talking to people about
the right keywords is the game’s main challenge, it seems, and it’s not a
challenge I much enjoy.
Incidentally, this is the first game I’ve played in Adrift 5. I don’t know what
kind of improvements it has over Adrift 4 for authors, but the one big change I
see on the player side is that the automap is now 3D, and can be rotated freely
by clicking and dragging.
Reviewed by Duncan Bowsman
It occurs to me that it is likely few of the other judges have played the
original Camelot to which your recent IFComp entry, Return to Camelot, is a
sequel. While I don't think knowledge of the previous game is necessary to
complete or enjoy Return to Camelot, I wonder if I would be wrong in assuming
that this previous knowledge makes me part of a select few-- the ideal audience
for this game!
No doubt-- recalling how critical I was of Camelot-- you may think I have a laundry list of bad things to say about your latest game, but that's not quite so this time. I did find a lot of bugs, true, and some of the writing could use a brush-up (this has been discussed in other reviews-- I won't mention it since you've no doubt already heard it), but overall I was pleasantly surprised by Return to Camelot. I came away amused with your fun, light fantasy piece-- my enjoyment rated it a solid 3/5.
For one thing, I was glad to find there was no conflict in tone throughout this one aside from the opening fake-out. I was a little disappointed to find that the protagonist being a detective didn't play a larger role in the story, but didn't feel it actively detracted from the story. I would've liked to see more of Igor and Merlin and to have done more investigating. Was the shoulder holster an important item in a puzzle I missed?
I had some problems with ADRIFT 5, but I don't know how much control you had over these things and whether they should be classified as author or platform problems. It's interesting to be in this position for once, being so much less familiar with 5 than 4, especially since so many complaints about ADRIFT games derive from this very aspect. So here are two of the problems I ran into: “w” auto completes to “wear” instead of “west” and the suit of armour was incredibly fiddly about how I referred to it... such that I had to get it by using a (puzzle-breaking?) >GET ALL. On a second test play through just recently, I'm told the knight in the room warns me away from it, but I end up with it in my inventory anyway. I also got this error message from time to time which said "Error evaluating PassSingleRestriction for restriction 'Player must be in same room as Any Character.' The given key was not present in the dictionary."
The castle layout is familiar from the last game, which made it easy for me to navigate, and even more pleasing to find little secrets throughout that we didn't get to see in the last one. One thing that was mysteriously missing which I thought could have been explained, though, was the door from the maid's room to Guinevere's... unless I just missed where that was explained, which is possible. From playing this game, I think that the presentation of the kitchen and courtyard are basically emblematic of each game in the Camelot series thus far-- the first had a brutal kitchen and the courtyard's most noticeable feature were its mean-spirited guards, but here we have a more cheerful kitchen and the setup for a circus in the courtyard.
Is the kitchen maid, perhaps, the first non-sexualized female character to be represented in one of your games? Seeing “her muscles through the thin woven blouse she's wearing” seems to toe the line of sexuality in the description, but in contrast to other females in your games this looks to be a step forward. On the other hand, it also reinforces the “sturdy” nature of peasantry under King Arthur, so it seems to be commenting on social conditions within the castle. They've have definitely improved since the use of slave labour in the original.
I never did find the Wizard's Nightclub, or make a sandwich, or get a rose for the maid, but I did manage to finish the game. I may have missed quite a bit of it. What do you think? Regardless, I might not have been able to finish within the time limit otherwise!
The major mechanic involving the ring and paintings was easy to pick up on, used enough throughout to make it into a pattern, and it pays off dramatically at the end of the game. There was one weird moment where I had to remove the ring and wear it again to get it to work. The final few puzzles especially reminded me of a wacky Errol Flynn adventure, which I think is the overall tone this game was going for.
If you're interested in discussing any other bugs I found, telling me where the Wizard's Nightclub is, or in talking about the game in any other way, please let me know.
Reviewed by MathBrush
This game has you going to
Camelot to help Guinevere.
The plot is a bit and thin,
and the ADRIFT parser is as weak as ever.
But the game is fairly
detailed, and a lot of thought has gone into it.
The main weird thing is that
wearing a ring is important to the story, but it always slips off your finger.
Also, Hagrid makes an appearance in the game, talking about Dumbledore.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
| Any donation would be much appreciated to help keep the site online and growing. | To help make your donation quicker and
easier just click the "Donate" button and you will be taken to the secure Paypal donation page. |
|
| Home | About Me |
