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Call of the Shaman Reviews
Author: Larry Horsfield
Date: 2019
ADRIFT 5.0
Reviewed by Mathbrush
I've seen the Alaric Blackmoon series suggested to
me on IFDB for years, but never tried one of the games.
There are six or
more in the series, and they involve a valiant warrior in Europe in the times of
swords and armor.
In this game, you travel to America to encounter a
Native American shaman.
I'd love to talk more about the game, but I
encountered a game-destroying bug. A thief comes into town, and you chase him
out. When I killed him, he kept appearing anyway, and so I was periodically
kicked out of town and could not reach the trading post.
I'd love to
update my review if this bug were fixed!
Reviewed by
Thomas Mack
Although it’s the sixth in a series that goes back to
1990, this game is the first of the prolific author’s that I’ve played. It’s a
solid work that has an original setting and gameplay that feels like an actual
adventure, rather than slogging through a series of unrelated puzzles.
Gameplay: Playing the game does feel like being on an adventure, including
wandering around the setting and securing supplies. The Adrift interface is a
bit clunky (no small part of which is simply my unfamiliarity with it), but
otherwise the gameplay is smooth. The main difficulty I had with it is that even
with the walkthrough, it’s often difficult to figure out what I should be doing
or how to advance the plot. 5/10.
Mechanics: Maybe it was my
unfamiliarity with the series, but I found it difficult to know what to do next.
There are several guess-the-verb situations (e.g., early in the game, the player
must follow the thief by explicitly typing FOLLOW THIEF; trying to do so by
choosing an explicit direction fails), and it was unclear in some situations
exactly how to proceed despite knowing what to do (e.g., the exact commands
needed to interact with the thief’s shelter). The puzzles weren’t so much about
manipulating set-piece constructions with inventory items, but rather just about
figuring out what to do next. It’s a nice change, and it fits the open adventure
style of the game. 5/10.
Presentation: The setting of the game is a
historical-fantasy version of North America, in which the protagonist both
encounters a pastor with a Dutch accent and wears a ring given to him “by the
dwarf Grom on the battlements of Domreil Castle.” It’s a novel and interesting
one, but I found it a bit confusing, not having played any of the previous games
in the series. I encountered a few typos (e.g., “I don’t understand what you
want to do with The [sic] trader.”), and the capitalization of directions in
room descriptions is odd, but neither issue significantly detracts from the
work. 6/10.
You might be interested in this game if: You’ve played any of
the author’s many other games.
Score: 5
Reviewed by Alex/Comfort Castle
Played 2nd October
Windows executable version played
1hr 45mins played,
only about halfway through game
Note that I haven’t finished this game –
I’ve spared 15 minutes of the 2-hour judging period with the hope of coming back
and giving it another shot if I have time at the end of the comp, but I probably
won’t reach the ending.
The Call of the Shaman is a sizable
historical-fantasy ADRIFT game, part of Horsfield’s Alaric Blackmoon series.
Alaric’s bride has been poisoned, and Alaric (the player character) has
travelled to “North Americanus” to find the Cherokee shaman who can produce an
antidote.
This is my first ADRIFT game, so many of the things I pick on
here may be inherent to the ADRIFT engine. I think the presentation gets off to
a bad start, with different colours for each paragraph on the splash screen
looking ugly. However, the coloured text becomes a virtue – when you use the
recommended default cyan text, the orange text that indicates changes to the
game state’s stands out. If you’re using ADRIFT’s incredibly convenient map pane
to fast-travel, this helps a lot, so you can see why your character’s suddenly
gone back to the forest instead of where you wanted him to go. (Full disclosure:
I drafted most of the review on 2nd October, but I’m writing this paragraph on
the 7th after playing another ADRIFT game (Treasure Hunt in the Amazon). This
paragraph was originally a mean little rant about how much I disliked the
default ADRIFT presentation, but I’m warming to it now, and it would be unfair
to hold it against Call of the Shaman anyway.)
I can’t vouch for the
story because I’m only halfway through with no prospect of seeing the end within
the judging period (more on that soon), but it doesn’t excite me so much. Alaric
Blackmoon’s new wife has been poisoned by the villain of a previous game(?), and
Alaric is on a quest to find an antidote in very early colonial America (the
Dutch presence suggests an analogue of early New Amsterdam being settled). Much
of my time was spent wandering around this early settlement trading and solving
little quests, including dispatching a thief. It feels very bog-standard for a
fantasy, but maybe if I had played the previous five episodes of the Alaric
Blackmoon series, I’d be more engaged.
I’m afraid I disliked actually
playing this. Puzzles seem to have one specific command to solve them, leading
to bad guess-the-verb issues for me. From what I’ve heard, this might be to do
with the ADRIFT engine’s structure rather than Horsfield, and the author does
sometimes provide the correct command if the player is on the right track – I
wish he did it more often. (There’s an instance where SEARCH gives no feedback
but LOOK UNDER is correct, for example – I might just be sour that I missed it,
but I think those commands should overlap.). Also, some of these commands are
too blunt, I suppose? The kind of thing where you solve a puzzle by typing
“SOLVE PUZZLE”. For example, you chase a thief by typing “FOLLOW THIEF.” It is
established that he is running northwest, but typing “NW” to follow the thief
actually loses him. I can’t figure out why.
This actually leads to a
game-breaking bug. If you lose the thief the first time, he reappears the next
time you’re outside a shop in the settlement, and you automatically go to his
hideout. But this event is never disabled – the thief always redirects you to
his hideout, even if you’ve killed him. So you can’t buy the supplies you need
to progress with the money you get from the thief. This is a big bug, and it
really ought to have been caught in playtesting – as it is, troubleshooting this
took up a big chunk of my judging period.
I had to give up when trying to
leave for the Cherokee nation, only to be told I need water supplies. There’s a
well in the town, but I can’t find what I need to fill up with water. Because of
my bad puzzle experiences so far, I don’t know whether I need to search for a
bottle or container, or whether I just need to find the right way to say “GET
WATER.” The solution isn’t in the hints, and I wanted to move on to other games
at this point.
(Update 10th October: As Larry Horsfield kindly points out
in the comments, the solution actually is in the hints, referring to an action I
assumed I’ve tried and didn’t bother to check. This is entirely my fault –
apologies to Horsfield for the error! I hope to come back to this game later in
the judging period, and will update this review again accordingly.)
If I
figure it out, I may come back to Call of the Shaman after I’ve seen the other
comp entries and use the 15 minutes I have left on the clock. I’m curious to see
how Horsfield writes the Cherokee nation. (Did the Cherokee nation and the Dutch
settlers get on, or even meet? I don’t know my American history, but I
instinctively feel like that’s not how colonialism in America usually went.)
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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