Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short
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Polished in its own way, January 28, 2014Candy Quest 3 is a text-based RPG, reminiscent of the bizarrely addictive Candy Box but, in this case, implemented in rainbow-colored Twine.
You belong to a world where combat and magic-like powers are accomplished using candy. Monsters drop rock candy as loot. NPCs require lollipops to do you certain favors.
Descriptions are simple and spare, so as not to get in the way of the numbers involved in combat. The mechanics replicate a lot of standard RPG features, but with a very deft touch.
Take combat: each time you go up against a monster you can choose to attack or to consume some of your candy in order to strengthen your armor or attack abilities. There's no randomness at work here, and even so, it's possible to undo an unsatisfactory move by using the browser back button. Winning combat is typically about figuring out a good way to stack the multiplicative properties of your candies: some candies double the effect of the next candy you eat, for instance, or double an existing stat rather than simply adding a number to it. While you never level up, you do find more and more types of candy that can contribute to your stats, creating absurdly heightened powers.
There's a tiny bit of object-collection grind, but really only a taster amount: enough to make the process of collection interesting, not enough to make the player really sick of trooping back to the village store.
There are one or two other fun surprises, including a puzzle or two. Taken together, it's an amusing and extremely well-balanced piece -- unsurprisingly, considering the respect Brough commands for the ingenuity of his other indie games.
The only part that confused me came at the very end. (Spoiler - click to show)I'd reached 99% doom averted when I encountered a state where my only option was to "wake up", accompanied by a broken image link. Clicking "wake up" brought me back to the same state over and over. I suppose I could see this as an end (of sorts) to the game, but the fact that the image link was broken made me wonder whether it wasn't a bug instead.
This is a good example piece for people who are interested in Twine games that push the traditional boundaries of Twine, and also for those who are interested in IF combat options that go beyond randomness and UNDO-prevention.
Besides, it's just fun -- if in a very different style from a classic text adventure.
If you have tried other work by Porpentine, you probably have some idea whether you'll like this: it too is about the relationship to your body, about reclaiming your sexuality for yourself, about culture and the way society frames gender. It is also about video games and the game as body.
It is not about any of these things in a way that resembles an ordinary plotted story. It uses music, voice, colored links, images, sometimes links to outside resources and video. It is not contained in the files of the game, but reaches out into the real world.
At one point, the protagonist's body is represented by a huge page of links, an overwhelming number of nodes, some of them active, some not, painfully colored. The process of navigating this page, bringing more nodes alive, might be seen as a kind of puzzle, but it is meaningful less as a puzzle than as a metaphor for the strangeness of the self; of parts that are numb, parts that are in pain, parts that are aroused.
In other sections, the piece hints at a more IF-familiar world model, of spaces to move through and directions of travel, and then subverts that model by offering attitudes and emotional stances as moves, alongside the usual EAST and WEST.
"HOW TO SPEAK ATLANTEAN" needs to be experienced more or less completely before it becomes comprehensible, because it uses confusion and alienation intentionally. I suspect some people will feel lost. I was a bit at sea myself during certain bits, but when I came to the end, I felt I had been told something interesting, something that would be hard to sum up in any fashion other than by handing on the piece to someone else.
So. I liked it, and found it both personal and artful.
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