Problem: I ran into a bug fairly early on. After visiting the foreman's room and trying to break the safe, I was unable to continue - there was a "Continue" link, but it wasn't clickable. After restarting, I worked around this by just skipping this room, and continuing onwards. Going back to that room after I got the key worked. There are also a bunch of other bugs in this game, mostly syntax errors with incomplete passages. Also literally the last line of the game is "Double-click this passage to edit it." which... is surprisingly apt given the path leading up to it.
The game got surprisingly compelling tbh... part of me wants to say that this game is the inverse of Undertale, but that would be only correct insofar that every game is the inverse of Undertale. It's hard for me to describe what makes this interesting; perhaps all the grinding got me addicted. The quality of the writing was good throughout, especially given that this was a gameplay-heavy intfic.
This is a RPG-like written in Twine, with a sparse aesthetic, reminiscent of some of the Twine RPGs of the last ifcomp (I forgot their names). It takes place in a standard Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy setting. The protagonist is an adventurer trapped in a mine, the last survivor of their party after a cave-in killed the rest. Apparently he's kind of a death seeker for unspecified reasons, who wants to go down in a blaze of glory saving a bunch of people. The mine is the domain of monsters; they're just living there peacefully, and you humans had the gall to invade their space, and when they attack in self-defense, you massacre them. Even more so, humans constantly “dehumanize” the monsters and treat them as an unintelligent, uncultured, indistinguishable mass. Eventually you have to kill their king. As you approach the king, the monsters are terrified of you and run away. The colonialism parallels are obvious.
A lot of the game involves mechanical combat, where you can choose to use attack, parry, or magic. Using the 'parry' action involves solving math problems selected from a pre-written bank, from "5 + 5" to derivatives. Interestingly this is the second ifcomp game I've played so far to incorporate math quizzes into the gameplay. The game says don't use a calculator, but most of the problems were easy to solve in my head. Does using pencil and paper count as cheating? The only confusing part was that it required decimals instead of just fractions. So I just used parry every time, so I never took any damage or exhaustion. But given how many random combat encounters there were, it got tiresome, but I memorized the answers.
Like with a lot of Twine RPGs I've seen in ifcomp, this game is not really "balanced" in any way. My level got ridiculously high, but it didn't really mean anything. I still don't know what exhaustion does because I only ever used parrying.
Translations of the goblin text:
Shrine:
MONSTERS HAVE BEEN DRIVEN FROM EVERY LAND
BUT GHIDORAH UNITED US INTO ONE TRIBE
WE PRAISE HIM, LORD OF THREE FIRES
MASTER OF THE WORLD BENEATH EARTH
MAY HIS REIGN BRING PEACE TO THE WORLD OF MONSTERS
