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Give me five!, June 10, 2023Not giving a five to this game is simply a crime against posible future path walkers.
The game presents you one after another, in a linear but somewhat random manner, some archetypal situations, I would say symbolic ones.
The door, the beast, the trap, the plague, the illness, the death, ...
These tell a story in the way tarot cards do, stimulating your imagination with sketches. And although these are more elements of "setting" rather than structural elements, I see in them a certain resemblance to Propp's functions (*), or at least we are facing a type of game that could take advantage of them.
The game follows the classic line of the hero facing a series of unrelated situations or tests, a tradition that goes from Hercules' labors with his apples and Cerberus to The Princess Bride, with its cliffs of insanity and its fire swamp plagued with R.O.U.S., treacherous sparkling sands, and sudden eruptions of fire.
The responses to commands that a conventional adventurer would predictably use, such as "examine," seem like a good choice. The responses are clear: Stay focused on the path, and in this case, the game's title itself is not just an aesthetic or marketing decision but a statement of intent.
I think expecting the same granularity of actions in all games is limiting. Actions like "examine" or "north" wouldn't fit in a game where each "room" represents, for example, a year in a person's life, and that wouldn't invalidate or make those games better or worse.
Simply a brilliant move. Gimefive, man!
(*) For more information on this hipster reference, search for Vladimir Propp and his functions, which I discovered a few years ago in Gianni Rodari's "Grammar of Fantasy."