Zarf Updates

Continued from previous post. I finished all of these! Sometimes with hints.

• Strange Antiquities
• Daymare Town
• The House of Tesla

Strange Antiquities

• by Bad Viking -- game site

A worthy sequel to Strange Horticulture, packed with all the stuff I enjoy. Observation of a wide variety of evidence. Indirect logic, occult symbols, allusive clues, alchemical reference books, and secret panels. So many secret panels! And a cat.

The story is better integrated, a season-arc which you investigate -- or help other people investigate, really; you're just the shopkeeper. (Cozy!) But of course you get dragged in to resolve the crisis at the end.

Exploration is actively encouraged this time around. Horticulture more or less tied you to the shop, except for specific missions. Wandering the uncanny landscape at random just kicked your dread meter. In Antiquities, the map is tighter -- the town of Undermere. And wandering the town is fun! You probably don't want to intrude on private homes or the creepy woods, but there's no penalty for checking out libraries, museums, parks, and City Hall. Not to mention the plant shop from the first game. Useful surprises may await.

(Later the map is extended to more precarious locations, where you have to be more careful. You'll know 'em when you see 'em.)

My only nit is that the ending isn't much more than an extra-large mission, followed by a wrap-up scene. It's a perfectly satisfying ending to the story -- but it doesn't feel more satisfying than the rest of the game. Which is, to be sure, very satisfying to play. Go play it.

An apology: I previously referred to the setting as "European-ish medieval-ish". That was silly of me. Undermere is a spooky riff on Windermere, the English Lake District. The weird local cultists are very British cultists. And I feel like it's the 1800s; I bet someone can pin that down more precisely.

Daymare Town

• by Mateusz Skutnik -- game site

A remake of a series of Flash games from, I think, 2007-2013. According to the Kongregate page, anyhow. (Remember Kongregate?)

I have always loved Skutnik's style, ink-expressive and creepy and subtly surreal. Cyclopean cliffs and abysses. Floating rocks. Brick arches which crumble silently into the sky. I was happy to see the Submachine series reappear on modern platforms (as Submachine: Legacy), and Slice of Sea a couple of years before that.

Daymare Town has all of that, in spades and more. Maybe more than enough of it. I honestly don't remember what the original Flash games were like -- but in this one, exploring is intensely finicky. Layers and layers of rooms, alleys, and niches. Does this alley have nooks to the left and right as well as ahead? You'd better check and double-check, every time. The art style just doesn't try to convey it.

(The game has a "hard" mode in which objects are slightly less prominent. I didn't generally have a problem noticing objects; it's exits that are tricky. An "easy mode" for exits would have been a benefit, I think.)

Remember I said Neyyah's problem was balance? Everything Daymare Town does is familiar -- it's the same kind of gameplay as in Submachine. And I like that gameplay. I enjoy a good pixel hunt. But it felt like this time, I was grinding through the landscape. Traversing every room over and over, hoping to unearth that one last cog that will uncover one more orb that will unlock the next gate. By the last chapter, I was playing from a walkthrough.

The puzzles are generally lightweight use-this-on-that. It's only hard because, again, there's a lot of stuff scattered around a lot of landscape. By mid-game, experimentation means clicking thirty or forty inventory items. And in a surreal world, puzzles require a lot of experimentation. (Why a seashell? Why there?)

Nearly all of these items are peripheral to the main game -- there are many side interactions and achievements to discover. That's great; they add to the texture of the world; but you've still got this very bulky inventory to deal with.

The story... is barely a story. Something's up with the mist and the world going away, but don't expect extensive narration. It's all environment and weird little characters to interact with. This is Skutnik's forte (is there really a cohesive storyline to Submachine? Do we care?) so just roll with it. A running schtick takes the piss out of "___ will remember that", which made me chuckle every time.

No, play it for the artwork and the visual style. Also, this release includes the platformer-interlude originally published as Daymare Cat, in which you assemble an audio track by Cat Jahnke (as "Cat and the Menagerie"). Worth the price of admission on its own.

The House of Tesla

• by Blue Brain Games -- game site

I said I wanted more The Room fan games, and here it is.

Tesla is a followup to the House of Da Vinci series, which was such a Room riff that it straight-up lifted its magic-lens idea. (Not a criticism -- the Riven remake borrowed it too. It's too good an idea to not borrow.) This time around, we swap the magic lens for a magic "see electrical flows" device. You can also use it to connect certain devices with wireless power. We did say this was Nikola Tesla's house, right?

All of these series tend to ramp up their size and ambition as they progress. House of Tesla drops the series format entirely; the entire intended progression is crammed into a single game. At least, that's what it looks like. If you divided Tesla into thirds, I think each part would be larger than the original House of Da Vinci release. Lotta game here, is what I'm saying.

Which is good and bad. These games were originally scaled to be played an hour or two at a time, on a handheld device, sitting in a comfy chair. Tesla still has the touchscreen-centric design: one-finger controls, free panning but no free movement. But the economics of mobile have forced it to a Steam-first release. And thus, forced me to my Big Gamer Chair, inhaling the game in marathon sessions until puzzles dripped out my ears. Overstuffed rather than cozy. Well, I still enjoy adventure games, and I'm happy to pay Steam prices for them.

(Perhaps the economics of Steam forced Tesla to the big-game-all-at-once model, rather than a spaced-out sequence of short games. I'm less sure of that. I'm plenty sure that mobile revenues suck.)

So, overstuffed with puzzles. How's that work out? Uneven, but very good overall. Like I say about Quern: if a game contains enough kinds of puzzles, it's bound to contain your least favorite. (Block-slider, cough.) Tesla sticks to mild versions of its puzzle ideas, though, rather than skull-crackers. So when you come across one that annoys you, it won't annoy you for too long.

To be sure, there were some puzzles that were under-clued, or which I didn't understand at all. I looked at the hints, cried "moon logic!" and hammered the hint button until an explicit answer came out. Or I unlocked the box by accident and couldn't figure out why it had worked. Or I did understand the puzzle but decided it was too annoying to solve, so hammer time again.

(The designers say they're working on a "skip this puzzle" button. Clearly a good idea.)

But the majority of the puzzles were solid fun. Even the familiar tropes had a bit of an original twist. The jumping-pegs puzzle won big points by permitting two-way moves, rather than the (much too) familiar "restart-from-scratch" button.

(One nitpick: a scene where you combine colors of fluorescent gases in tubes. Perfectly good puzzle, except that you combine cyan, magenta, and yellow to make red, green and blue. Yes, mixing magenta and yellow glowing gases produces glowing red. Yes, these gases are explicitly transparent when not electrified. I cannot express how painful I find this.)

The story, I'm afraid, was a lot of maundering about Tesla and Mark Twain and Aleister Crowley, of all people. Twain really was a friend of Tesla (things I learned!) but the game doesn't manage to make anything of this. And Crowley just shows up as a generic bugaboo, with bonus mysticism to contrast with Tesla's mad science. This is all extensively explored in flashbacks, but they're just an excuse for more puzzles. Which need no excuse!

The interesting antagonist is Tesla's indomitable ability to spend money faster than he could raise it. The game highlights this, but there's no satisfactory ending to that story, in the game or in real life.

So, a big old puzzle-fest and I enjoyed it. Will there be a House of Tesla 2? I'm sure they could go there if the sales justify it. Or maybe they're setting up for House of Crowley. I'd play that.