Heroine's Mantle

Baf's Guide

Massive, and massively ambitious, this game combines a sweeping and complex plot with some of the most fiendish puzzles in existence. You are a young woman swept into the role of superheroine, and the game provides enough hair-raising adventures to fill a half-dozen lesser works of IF. There are many, many locations, NPCs, and scenarios; action scenes worthy of a John Woo movie; and utterly ludicrous challenges to overcome.

Speaking of ludicrous, the puzzle design needs quite a lot of work. The superheroine has certain powers, which are rather fun, and which the game allows the player to learn in a fairly effective manner. Not all of the puzzles turn on these powers, however, and others don't use them in obvious ways; there are many, many places where the game requires syntax that might not be obvious and that is non-standard to IF. Likewise, some puzzles are only solvable by a complex sequence of read-the-author's-mind maneuvers.

Finally, some people may have mixed reactions to the game's treatment of gender -- the overt feminist propaganda sits a bit oddly next to a sometimes voyeuristic treatment of individual women.

In other words, this is a game with higher highs and lower lows than most; where it's good, it's great, and where it's bad, it's terrible. On the whole it comes out worth playing -- set aside a few weeks for the task, because it is not a small game -- but have the solution handy. Some of these puzzles are just not going to make sense any other way.

-- Emily Short

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I enjoyed this, but there was context., April 27, 2010
There's been a few games where a significant part of my experience was tied up in community play; something fairly long and puzzle-oriented gets released outside the comp, and there's a few weeks during which a good portion of IF people are playing simultaeneously. There's a tone of mild competition, you can get tailored hints fairly easily, and if you want to discuss something about it then it's fresh in everyone's mind. It doesn't happen too often; the game needs to be fairly long, somewhat difficult and reasonably well made. First Things First and Savoir Faire are good examples of games that really benefited from this kind of play, but I think of Heroine's Mantle is the primary example -- largely because I wouldn't have played it very far without that context.

The style is superhero cheese plus a good deal of campy spy thriller. I'm fairly sceptical about how suited superhero fiction is to IF; it's a genre all about action and visuals, it doesn't exactly play to IF's strengths. HM deals with the action problem by making your powers functional but quite limited, like the superhero version of an Enchanter spell; this is a tenable approach, but the puzzle structure is really too linear to make the powers feel very powerful. There is a good use of the training-sequence in which you learn to use your powers -- common in mainstream videogames, not much-used in IF. (A game needs to be pretty long for it to be of much use; games like The Erudition Chamber or The Recruit, which are entirely training-sequence, always strike me as kind of unsatisfying.) The puzzles are generally pretty hard, there are a lot of them, they're mostly very traditional in style, and they're sometimes a little awkward.

The writing's indifferent, and the plot's about at the standard of Hollywood superhero movies, with similar problems of tone -- too earnest, and inclined to leering. Your mileage may vary. Length is a big advantage; most IF is so short that there's little space for character arc or really explore a game mechanic. So the storytelling here isn't very dense, but it can still accomplish a fair bit.

If you like old-school puzzlers and superheroes, and aren't very sensitive to representation of women in fiction, you're likely to get a lot out of this. Otherwise, unless circumstances align, it's likely to be a struggle.

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