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1-6 of 6 I'm Thanos Now!, December 23, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The term Interactive Fiction, just the term now, implies technology but leans heavily into literary tradition. But we call them GAMES more often than not. Does that seem right to you? I get it, its the ‘Interactive’ part. It creates a deep intersection with the game experience. Sure, and it’s also the march of history - the early ouvre’ was decidedly game based not narrative based. And who am I to snippily try to draw a line between two things that have lived together in one big muddy swamp for decades anyway?
So Vambrace is a game. A full on ascii-map, fight-the-monsters game. On firing it up I felt I had its measure instantly: Rogue-ish RPG-lite dungeon crawl. It wasn’t stunning insight on my part, the blurb told me that right up front. I settled in for what I knee-jerkingly presumed would be a Mechanical experience because knee-jerks are the province of REAL jerks. I further dug a hole for myself when I looked up vambrace (and I do like learning new words) to find it is forearm armor. That you put power gems in. Yeah, I’m Thanos now.
What a dickish way to engage a game, right? Thankfully, early on a single detail threw my preconception baggage out the window and forced me to engage it with unbiased eyes. That detail? One command was named INVESTIGRAB. I can’t stop smiling at that goofy portmanteau. I wish I had come up with it. The syllables sing with sincere, silly poetry. When I used that command (the single letter ‘I’) I consistently proclaimed in dramatic timbre INVESTIGRAB!. Mostly in my head, but occasionally out loud to the deep consternation of my family. Hey, IF like no one’s watching, right?
[Time to queue up this review’s soundtrack!]
That single ridiculous, wonderful word temporarily flushed the self-satisfied a@%hole out of my system and let me meet the game on its own terms. It is an ascii map, navigated and interacted with in single letter commands. This UI choice pops ya’ll. There is almost no friction between you and game progress. Pop! Pop! Pop! While you were reading this, I just ran end to end and killed two monsters! This super-fleet implementation choice, along with tight humor and legit puzzles delivered on the frothy good-time promise made by INVESTIGRAB.
As the game progresses, your suite of frustratingly mild-effect spells grows organically so as not to overload your progress with ‘what all can I do now?’ The Ascii map is similarly poppy and crisp - exactly the details needed to zip around. And it builds its puzzle space as well. You start with ‘hey I know this spell, use it and win!’ to ‘Yikes, none of these spells are Aces, I need to start building combos.’ It ends up being way more puzzle than RPG, to its extreme benefit.
Now, some of the puzzles didn’t click for me - they required using spells in ways that are counter-intuitive, (Spoiler - click to show)like using GUST to also mean PRESS OR SELECT. I think I consulted the walkthrough twice and was glad I did. But others were EXACTLY right, and still others challenging, but delivering that sweet sweet endorphin rush of ‘hey that’s a clever puzzle AND I SOLVED IT!!!’ I think maybe I am slower than average, I did not finish in two hours. Two hours in, the thing pops with Sparks of Joy. A little too light and a shade too ‘need the walkthrough’ to be truly Engaging, but peppy fun for sure. Notwithstanding puzzle design that sometimes was not quite there, a Seamless experience with a great, simple, transparent UI design.
PostScript: As I was playing, I kept comparing it mentally to last year’s Trouble in Sector 471. Turns out there’s a good reason for that! For me, this one (wait for it…) popped just a little bit more.
Played: 10/13/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I mean, yeah, I’m gonna finish this. It is light, friendly, amusing and more fun than frustrating.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
[You can kill the soundtrack now. You probably got the gist.]
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Pauldron of peril, gorget of glory, November 30, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
It’s probably the dream of most IF authors to be a prolific writer of high-quality games, but contemplating the oeuvre of Arthur DiBianca, who’s perhaps comes as close to that ideal as anybody currently working, I wonder whether there’s a downside to such consistency. Does there ever come a point where the audience starts to take you for granted, and greet each new work with a simple “ho hum, here’s yet another really fun Arthur DiBianca game”? I hope that’s not the case, but I have to say, I was not the slightest bit surprised to find that Vambrance of Destiny is pretty great.
Like pretty much all of his work, this is a limited parser game, one that specifically feels like an iteration on last year’s IFComp entry, Trouble in Sector 471. Like in that game, here we’ve got a nicely-realized minimap, a metroidvania explore-to-upgrade-to-explore-more structure, and a main objective that’s largely advanced by using your abilities to beat baddies. Here, though, the robot-topia of Section 471 is swapped for the aesthetics of dungeon-crawling fantasy; plotwise, you’ve got to delve into an ancient ruin to beat up a rogue wizard and reclaim his stolen staff of power, and ability-wise, you’ve got the eponymous arm-armor, which evinces various spell-like abilities as you fill its various receptacles with magical gems. There’s also a cool tech upgrade this time out, which is that the game is played with single keypresses – no need to type out full commands or even hit enter – which is a nice convenience (the tilde key allows access to SAVE, LOAD, and other systems commands, though).
The story and writing are relatively minimal – the Foozle shows up a couple times to taunt you, but otherwise this is a simple get-to-the-end-to-beat-the-boss affair, while the absence of an EXAMINE action helps keep the location descriptions tight and focused. They work well for what they are, don’t get me wrong, but like most of DiBianca’s games, VoD lives and dies by its puzzles. And unsurprisingly, they’re really quite well done.
The process of getting new capabilities via gem upgrades is always fun, of course, and you get to master a fun set of spells over the course of the game, from elemental attacks to teleports to summoning spells. Having spent a bunch of time recently assessing the design of limited-parser games, I’m increasingly of the mind that the key challenge is to avoid the lawnmowering problem – that is, making it too tempting for the player to make progress simply by running through all the different options at their disposal whenever they hit an obstacle, rather than engaging with the puzzle and trying to solve it. Vambrance avoids this pitfall handily; the challenges progress nicely as you go, with straightforward one-spell-required obstacles soon giving way to more complex ones that require an extended sequence of different spells, or have timing elements that require you to wait or otherwise pay attention before spamming different actions. This variety of strategies keeps things fresh, and means that spamming all the spells in turn eventually becomes tedious and unproductive.
Of course, there’s also a risk of making challenges too complex – which is just that a game becomes too hard. VoD generally stays on the right side of this line, too. I struggled a bit with some of the multi-step solutions in Sector 471, but generally had an easier time here, I think because the game does a great job providing feedback for when you’re on the right track or have come up with a partial solution. As with most of DiBianca’s games, the most esoteric puzzles are mostly saved for optional side-objectives (here, there are a dozen bonus treasures to collect along the way to the big boss, in keeping with the dungeon crawl theme). That said, while I did complete all the puzzles, both the critical path and the optional ones, I did wind up going to the hints more than a few times towards the end – ultimately, you wind up accumulating over a dozen different ability-gems, some of which are fairly involved to use (like the one that enables you to temporarily teleport in one of a half-dozen different objects), which feels like it starts to strain at the borders of how limited a limited-parser game can be.
Still, even the puzzles I got hints on were well-clued in retrospect, and fun to solve. The climactic fight with the rogue wizard is also a really good time. It maybe doesn’t play completely fair, I have to admit -- (Spoiler - click to show)you need to beat him in a spell duel, and after a warm-up round where he throws things with obvious counters at you, and then starts mixing in ones that require extrapolation from puzzles you’ve previously solved, to a final set that actively mislead you, telegraphing one vulnerability only to reveal a different, hidden one after you fail to stop it. This means that victory will almost certainly require an initial loss or two so you can memorize how to respond to these tricky ones, albeit trying again just takes half a dozen turns -- but since the whole sequence winds up being an enjoyable set piece, this notional violation of good game design principles winding up eminently forgivable.
All of which is to say: ho hum, here’s another really fun Arthur DiBianca game. Yawn. Can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Single-key dungeon crawler with increasingly complex powers, November 22, 2023This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).
Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.
Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.
But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.
This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Well done but not for me, November 18, 2023I didn't finish this one, as after playing for a bit it became clear that it just wasn’t for me. The super-limited parser (e.g., type “i” to “investigrab”, which provides more detail on and/or takes anything that’s important in the current room) removed the aspect of parser games I most enjoy, which is the sense of agency and exploration. Here, I knew there were no secrets to uncover by closely examining my surroundings; it was just a rote matter of hunting down gems to increase my powers to hunt more gems. It’s definitely a well-done game, just very much not my style!
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3 people found the following review helpful:
A fun dungeon adventure!, November 13, 2023The Vambrace of Destiny is a dungeon crawler adventure, with limited commands and filled with puzzles. You must go through the different levels of the dungeon, fight monsters, discover treasures, and gather all the spells.
I did not reach the ending. The current review only account for what was played.
Until I reached the second level and was essentially stuck, banging my head against the wall because I could not solve the puzzles, TVoD was quite an enjoyable light parser (especially for a parser-adverse/noob like me). It has limited commands, which are essentially shortcuts; a visible map on the screen (at least in the play online version), which showed where you are and what rooms you discovered, and reasonable logical puzzles (even the one I got stuck on...), and hints (external document).
The logic of the game is relatively simple: explore the dungeon, find a monster but can't fight it, explore some more, find a spell, fight the monster with the spell, go to the next bit. As you advance further, the puzzles require extra steps to be solved, often with combinations of actions or "passing a turn". Even if some puzzles required retracing your steps to unlock further parts, they were quite enjoyable to solve!
I still spent enough time faffing about, pressing the wrong direction on the screen, or forgetting to press a certain command, or just not getting the puzzle, that the clock ran out before I could reach the end. Starting level 2, the puzzles leave the beginner level... I think I managed to visit 1/3 to 1/2 of the rooms of level 2 before I gave up.
Still, I had quite a bit of fun, and breaking through the blocks on the path, defeating the monsters, and finding the treasures, were pretty satisfying! Level 1 is a hoot!
I really appreciated the simple commands (the investigrab especially!) and how merciful the game was (you might not manage to solve a puzzle or finish the game, but you won't die).
I want to revisit this game down the line (aka when a walkthrough drop - the hints are not enough for a noob), because I really want to reach the end.
[Originally played on 1-Oct during the IFComp]
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A well-presented dungeon crawl, November 7, 2023The Vambrace of Destiny is a parser-based IF by Arthur DiBianca, published for IFComp 2023. The game is a dungeon crawler with a very streamlined execution. The writing and world building are both fairly minimal, and the normal Inform 7 interface has also been heavily modified to only accept single-button input, which makes the gameplay feel remarkably fast-paced and smooth.
The game is technically very impressive. Once you get used to how the game works, playing it feels like a breeze. Although the limited input scheme is quite unusual, I could see it working for a number of other kind of games on Inform 7 too. There's also a map screen that becomes updated as you keep exploring the game world, which makes moment-to-moment gameplay feel even cleaner.
One drawback of all this streamlining is that it really highlights the old school, essentially fetch quest-like and quite repetitive nature of the adventure itself. There are some fairly intricate puzzles which require you to do things in a certain order, or with certain timing, to mix things up. Still, with the minimal storytelling and minimal interface, I found myself slightly demotivated to continue after a point. I think you might have to love old school dungeon crawling just for the sake of it to get the most out of this title.
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