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Number of Reviews: 5
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1-5 of 51 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Running down that hill, January 11, 2024I could not be furthest from the intended audience for this game: I absolutely hate running. I just don't get the appeal or why people would push themselves to exert themselves this way. Anything related to it will give me the hives...
Yet, I found myself engrossed with the story. Your will to finish this gruelling race, hopefully getting a good time too. Your frustration with your running companion, who is unusually lagging behind and whose condition is starting to worry you. And your struggles with the path, not quite as safe as you hoped.
While you are the character advancing the story, I felt it was more about Susan (or your relationship to Susan) that mattered most here. There are hints through most of the game to why your companion doesn't seem like herself -- though her condition is only vaguely mentioned in the ending, it is easy to assume what's what. Depending on your actions, the ending you get is heartwarming, even if a bit bittersweet, or pretty tragic...
The game is pretty short, with three and half room and hinted puzzles, branching into multiple endings (I think I managed to get three by myself?). One branching choice seems to have a random component to which path you'll end up taking (with the correct direction potentially changing with each playthrough).
It was a good well rounded short game!
We love games that make things accessible for newbies! :heart: walkthroughs
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Run for your life, September 22, 2023Here’s one of my pet theories of IF that I’m not sure I’ve written down before: there should be more parser games about sports. This isn’t due to any native affinity for them – more power to those who are into sports, I could care less about any professional teams, I only did a real sport for two semesters for all my high school and college years, and I’m the kind of schmuck who thinks it’s funny to respond “Interpol investigations” when the check-in question at a work meeting is “what’s your favorite Olympic event?”
No, it’s because of that old writing adage that action reveals character. We can get told that a character is clever or cowardly or chokes under pressure or what not, but until that gets on screen in some way – meaning, in a game, that they take some action that demonstrates the trait – it’s all theoretical. The trouble is, the sorts of character traits that can be revealed by the business of a typical parser game are fairly limited by the medium-dry-goods world model that tends to dominate: “resourceful” and “kleptomaniac” can only take you so far. Then consider that for a linear puzzle game, beyond the difficulty of coming up with and implementing multiple solutions to puzzles, it can also be a challenge for authors to invent reasons why different approaches might actually matter in narrative terms.
Sports offer a fresh way of engaging with these problems: beyond the fact that they create a rules-based framework that supports novel kinds of gameplay, their victory or scoring conditions also offer built-in consequences for a player’s choices, meaning that discrete, relatively-easy-to-implement physical actions can be freighted with narrative and/or thematic weight (This, by the way, is why my dark-horse pick for TV shows that totally should have gotten an RPG is Friday Night Lights). To be clear, I’m not saying that Madden 2023 would clean up at IFComp or anything – but that I do think there’s a lot of potential in parser games that use sports rather than conventional puzzles as their main gameplay elements.
Anyway, I wish that a) I’d written this theory down before playing The Last Mountain, and b) that I could count it as vindication of said theory, when the truth is that it could just be that a talented author like Dee Cooke can make any of their ideas look genius.
Yes, you might have lost track of the fact that this is technically a review somewhere in the previous four paragraphs of maundering, but I swear, these thoughts are relevant to understanding why this Adventuron game works so well, and feels (at least to me) so unique. The setup certainly isn’t one you’ve heard before: the player midway through a long-distance foot race with their running partner, Susan, who’s uncharacteristically flagging early as you tackle the last mountain before the finish line. You’ve got a water bottle, a flashlight, the race directions (there’s an orienteering component), and some walking poles, and with those you need to overcome a series of obstacles – getting tired, losing the trail, facing one last steep descent. Some of them are decision-points, some are inventory puzzles, and none on their own is that innovative – but again, the fact that they’re all happening in a race rationalizes the barriers, and adds a compelling urgency to solve them quickly.
Susan is the other part of the equation. The game deftly sketches your relationship with her – she’s somewhere between a friend and a mentor who helped bring you into this racing hobby – and presents her uncharacteristic fatigue as a central dilemma of the game. Again and again, you’re faced with the option (and Susan’s explicit prompting) to leave her behind so you can get a good finishing time. I’m guessing that most players won’t be tempted to ditch her, but still, the fact that the choice is there lends added weight to the individual puzzles.
The prose thus has to accomplish a lot of different things: create a sense of place, of course, while making sure to foreground Susan’s presence and give the player everything they need to engage with the game. It’s thankfully up to the task, and accomplishes all this with economy and without getting showy, too. Here’s a bit of mid-game scene-setting I especially liked:
"As the trees become denser, you realise how dark this forest can start to feel when the daylight isn’t so bright. You’ve never been here so late before. It makes it really difficult to identify the right path, even with Susan’s keen sense of direction.
"The forest has become really dense here. The smell of dry branches and the hooting of birds surround you, making you feel a little claustrophobic."
My one kick against the game is that I experienced a few guess-the-verb struggles, partially born of my own lack of experience with this kind of running, but also partially because the parser didn’t feel like it was meeting me halfway as I flailed about trying to figure out how to use the walking poles (yes, for those of you who have played the sailing sequence in Sting, I am aware of the irony of me of all people whining about this). Beyond that, I suppose one might complain that the player will guess what’s up with Susan well before the ending – but I don’t think that’s actually a fault with the game; the tension between the player’s suspicion that it’s serious, and the protagonist’s urge to do well in the race, is another piece of the engine that helps make it work so well. And for all that the reveal wasn’t a surprise, I still felt that it had emotional heft when it landed.
All of this is to say that I found The Last Mountain very good on its own merits, as well as instructive for the directions I think it suggests for future works, which is exactly the sort of thing one wants to come across in ParserComp!
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
ParserComp entry has choice-game feel, in a good way, August 28, 2023In The Last Mountain, you are on a multi-day mountain race with a friend, Susan, whom you've raced with before. You're doing pretty well. You might get a medal, which would be a first. But she's a bit exhausted midway through.
This immediately brings up a dilemma, as she says you should go on without her. But you can't. With the races you've run together before, it feels wrong. You can't read her mind, so you don't know what she really wants to do. And from here, there is a trade-off. She will slow you down. And some paths give adventures and realizations and accomplishments that others don't. (There's also a way to get lost!)
In essence, there are three main choices to make. This allows for eight endings. Some are similar, and some are different. I was aware of the walkthrough the author provided, and I planned to lawnmower through when I played it in-comp, but I didn't. It reminded me of other things, from a noncompetitive hike at summer camp where I and a friend started late but wound up getting to the destination first, to other challenges. This might be learning a programming language or getting through a computer game. Or, well, reviewing all the ParserComp games but getting distracted. Or maybe just reading a bunch of books in a short period of time, before they are due back at the library.
Or, one special in my case, writing X bytes a week to my weekly file. It's only a number, but all the same, it establishes something. That I've put in work and focus. And there's always the motivation to do more next week if I can, but that would break me, and I couldn't share my work or see what others are writing. It's a similar dilemma of "try for a medal or help a friend finish before the DNF (did not finish) cutoff." For me writing feels like something I can't give up, whether it's code for a new adventure or IFDB writing or maybe, one day, NaNoWriMo.
I got a lot out of the first endings, as I got the expected sliding scale from helping Susan versus achieving a personal goal. But as I played through them all, one noted that you gave up on racing for a while and came back to it. And it reminded me of other things I'd come back to, not needing to win it, and not needing to be super social. One of the big ones is/was chess, and hitting a certain rating. You want to do stuff by yourself, and you can probably hit a certain rating if you play a lot, but even if you get there, it might not feel good if you are playing to win. How you win matters. And breaking a new personal best rating feels much better if I win a good game instead of winning on time forfeit in a lost position. If I devoted myself too much to chess, I would ignore other things important to me, including sharing writing, even if it is not super-social. But TLM reminded me I still have goals to share, and they are worth sharing, even if I never reach the ratings stretch goals I once had.
Though the two entries that placed above it were deserving winners, TLM might be my favorite from the classic section of this comp, because it touches on issues of fulfillment in a subject and pastime I didn't know much about, but I can relate to it more.
The two above it were more swashbuckling and had flashier or cuter details, along with more humor, but TLM felt to me like it had more individuality, and it was the first of the three I replayed. It reminded me of the real-life adventures I wanted to take and maybe had given up on. It feels more like a choice-based or Twine game, with a relatively fixed plot and relatively few side rooms or things to examine. (You're tired. You don't have time for that!) And it could definitely be remade as one. But perhaps that wouldn't capture the essence of a mountain race as well, if you could just speed-click through. I mean, it doesn't slow you down with deliberate nuisances and annoyances, but the parser has a whole "don't sprint through this" feel which meshes clearly with what you're doing in the game.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
ParserComp 2023: The Last Mountain, July 29, 2023Athletic success requires sacrifices: time, friends, the manifold diversity of life, choosing instead to hone your body to a razorsharp blade, shaving off everything that doesn’t attenuate you to some point, the medal must be the point, a delineated absolute efficiency of existential framing in which all this is validated, an excellence you pursue and pursue until you one day wake up as, victoriously sculpted into an ideal several seconds more ideal than any other body screaming and panting up the steps. Years sweating into the dark dreaming of the podium, and it comes, and for the first time realized you stand there and realize you’re alone, suddenly being the only one at the end literalizes: “You always dreamt of this - standing on the little wooden step, the applause, being awarded a trophy to take home with you - but it’s bittersweet, as Susan isn’t here to see your achievement, and you still don’t know where she is or how she’s doing. / You sit for hours by the finish arch, your limbs stiffening up in the cold, as the dawn breaks and the sun comes up over the final peak of the Merrithorne route. You wait. / And wait.” And you remember what your old mentor said, the one who first paired you with your running partner, “‘It’s not the result, but rather the adventure along the way.’”
Which is fine to believe when you still await the result, while the journey still leads somewhere, but then you end up either way alone: “Sitting together in the sunshine, Susan finally explains why she’s been so tired during the race. She’s not well, she says, and she’s not going to get better. She didn’t - couldn’t - tell you before, but this was her last mountain race. She just wanted to finish one last time. With you.” You can choose whether or not to leave Susan behind, but you can’t bring Susan with you.
In this final refusal to finality, we’re left “trying your absolute hardest not to appear unhappy or worried or (god forbid) impatient” as you slow through a series of choices interrupting the “relentless forward motion” of marathoners, dallying in specific spaces just long enough to convince Susan forward, trying to remain useful in the gaps by gathering water, opening a pack of supplies, reading instructions. Because of this emphasis on the moments when you’re not running, The Last Mountain lacks the intensive rush of a race. Besides creating a bit of emotive dissonance, this nonintensity prevents the central dynamic of a running partner who can’t keep up from pressuring the player into confrontation. The writing reminds you that Susan is slowing you down, yet she’s right there with you as you U and D, with the only major moment of reprioritization being during a precarious descent when the game specifically instructs you to take time to watch Susan, but you could choose not to: “Suddenly, Susan loses her footing and falls. You should have been watching! / For a sickening moment, you are sure Susan is gone… but thankfully, she manages to cling to a ledge on the side of the cliff. She is badly injured and appears dazed, and it takes you a long time to climb down and pull her back onto the path, with help from other runners. It’s now clear you need to call the emergency services; it takes a while to get signal, but once you get through, an air ambulance quickly arrives and you are both whisked off to hospital. / Susan’s recovery process is long and only ever partial.” A disastrous ending, but not one earned by imbalancing priorities, rather merely out of curiosity for what happens if you deliberately defy the hint.
Replacing the emphasis on competitive speed is the bittersweet tenderness of caring for a running partner who is now more the noun than the adjective. The Last Mountain offers over ten endings, each one based upon the cumulative effect of small choices you make in each room, which filter into three basic categories: finishing with Susan, finishing without Susan, or failing along the way. The first category allows you to get the best possible marathon result but is typified pretty unambiguously as negative, while the third category is obviously not good. Instead, the game nudges you towards the second category, guiding Susan through steps along the path, so that you can finish this one last mountain as you always have, together. If you do the best job possible escorting her, putting as little strain on her as possible while guiding her carefully and refusing to let her fall behind, you receive what I believe is the best ending: “But somehow, in the end, Susan picks up the pace - to your great surprise. She puts everything she has into it, and you become so invested in getting her to the finish line that you stop caring about your own result. Susan beats you by two seconds - and incredibly, you finish bang on the cutoff time for the race. If you’d been one second slower, you’d have been disqualified, as rules are rules. You stare at your medal, feeling like you’ve witnessed a miracle. The unexpected medal is a sweet reward, but Susan’s sheer delight is sweeter.” This tenderness, in which your nurturing of her ability to excel exceeds your own desire to perform, delivers the true tonal intention, loving sweetness suffused with loss and loneliness.
Because you can care for someone through the gauntlet, overcome all the obstacles with them, struggle their excellence for both of you to awe, but the journey doesn’t last forever, some day you arrive where we’re all headed. Left alone on the path, how do you keep going, The Last Mountain muses: “For many years afterwards, you believe that Merrithorne was your last mountain, too. That the mountains were something you shared with Susan, and now that part of your life is over. / But eventually, you find yourself returning. New friends accompany you on your adventures now - but old friends’ voices forever linger in your ears, spurring you on along the mountain trail.” The how, the why, it doesn’t have an answer, but you do keep going, and in that, at least, you’re not alone. Maybe one day you will medal; standing on that podium, you’ll have so many memories to share it with.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
A short, sweet Adventuron story about a mountain race and friendship, July 14, 2023This is an Adventuron game with a forward impetus: no UNDO, no going backwards on the map, only forward, often with a choice or two on how to do so.
The focus is a lot on your companion, a friend you've done many mountain races with who is not feeling as strong as before.
+Polish: The story is well-polished, free from bugs and typos as far as I could see, and responsive to commands.
+Interactivity: The inability to go back or UNDO is annoying in a puzzle game but thematically appropriate for a game about the march of time in our own lives. Good coupling of puzzle with theme.
+Descriptiveness: The locations and people were described in a way that I could easily picture it all in my mind. The changes in the weather and the passage of time were evocative.
+Emotional impact: It made me think of important events in my own life, like a funeral I attended yesterday where I didn't know the person who died but I did know some of their friends.
+Would I play again? Maybe, after a long time, but I think one time is best for now. But I would recommend it to others.
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