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A Matter of Importance

by Valentine Kopteltsev profile

2007

(based on 8 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

All those scoundrels on The Board Of The Thieves' Guild... How could they? Sure, the last weeks weren't your most successful ones (in fact, you'd be glad to raze them from your memory if you only could), and a couple of times you barely got away. But in your profession, no one can be immune against runs of bad luck! Is it possible a few not too critical, albeit painful, slips make null and void several years of a glorious thief's career? And do these slips entitle upstarts like the Secretary of the Guild, Alice Touchmeenaught, to wipe the floor with you, as she did it in her speech?

Well, then. They put you on trial, giving you three days to "carry out a convincing project", as they formulated it? Hah! They're certainly in for a big surprise! After all, your high qualification is still with you, and you know it better than anybody else. They're gonna regret the way they've treated you!

Placed 10th in the 2007 IF Comp.


Game Details


Awards

10th Place - 13th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2007)

Editorial Reviews

SidneyMerk.com

...an uncomplicated story that delivers a bit of IF-specific satire, and it ends with a nice little twist... It ends with a small puzzle, it's told in an entertaining way, and even the time spent stuck wasn't a big frustration.
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Jörgs Wort[be]reich
Rezension zum IF-Comp 2007 (German)
Du spielst einen Dieb, vermutlich im England unserer Zeit, dessen jüngste Pechsträhne die Mißgunst seiner Gilde erweckt hat. Beauftragt, deinen Wert mit einer überzeugenden Entwendungsleistung zu beweisen, ziehst du los, und schon bald kommt dir eine Idee für einen grandiosen Bruch. ...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An experiment in item descriptions, and a heist game, February 4, 2016

In this mid-length game, you are about to be kicked out of the Thieve's Guild (in a modern town), and have to do one last big heist to impress them and not be kicked out.

The big concept of this game is that the author is sick of boring, unmotivated "That is not important" messages when examining items, so he has included flowery, motivated "That is not important messages". As a professional thief, you automatically know when an item, person, or room is unimportant to you.

Sometimes this is deceptive, as an unimportant thing may conceal an important thing.

This is a hard game, but I finished it without hints or walkthrough, because the versions I played had none (even the original competition version; I wonder if it had time-enabled hints). I had a vague hint from reading if comp reviews of the game on how to solve the soccer puzzle.

The English is a little iffy in places, but otherwise not bad.

Good for fans of heist games.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Learning to follow directions, February 8, 2022
by cgasquid (west of house)

little breaks immersion more than when the protagonist of the game refuses to follow your instructions.

there's a reason why so many people dislike stock parser answers like "Violence isn't the answer to this one" -- if i'm dealing with a padlock and holding a heavy rock in my hand, and i type BREAK THE PADLOCK WITH THE ROCK, i at least want to be informed of why my action failed. the stock response mocks the player for attempting a logical action. immersion break.

in a game like A Matter of Importance, half the actions you try are refused by the protagonist, often for the silliest of reasons. the protagonist is such an egotistical coward that they refused about half the actions i was able to give them, and examining almost anything comes back with a snotty message about it being unimportant.

the first move - third move, actually - puzzle is a guess-the-verb that makes no sense in context. i was only able to solve it (after multiple logical actions were "irrelevant" or "wouldn't help me") when the game gave up and told me (Spoiler - click to show)"maybe it would be better to ignore the cars," which clued the bizarre IGNORE CARS.

i tottered around a bit in what seemed to be the main game area, being informed that despite being a burglar i was not interested in any aspect of the building i intended to break into, nor in stealing anything else, nor in interacting with NPCs. and sometimes when the game informs you that something is irrelevant, it's lying, but you have to use exactly the right verb on the right specific detail to proceed. anything else would give you one of the game's stock "that's irrelevant" messages.

it's an aggravating feeling when the solution to a puzzle is right at your fingertips but you can't work out the correct phrasing to get your recalcitrant, obnoxious player character to do it.

there's a strong suggestion in the INFO menu that all of this is in aid of something: that this is supposed to be a difficult, frustrating game with some kind of manifesto or major twist at the end of it. but i've spent too much time beating my head against this game already.

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A Matter of Importance on IFDB

Recommended Lists

A Matter of Importance appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Crime and Heist games by MathBrush
I've played a lot of these recently, so I'm making a list. A contrast to my Detective and Mystery games list and similar to my Espionage and Spy game list, where I put Spider and Web, for instance.

Games what I like (for John) by insufficient data
These are some games that I like! They tend to err on the side of puzzle-y vs pure story games, and on the more polite side of the cruelty scale.




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