[IF Book Club] Spiritwrak

["Duncan Stevens" <dnrb@starpower.net>]

This is an IF Book Club post. See www.textfire.com/bookclub for more
information. Warning: there are major spoilers for Spiritwrak below.

This isn't an essay so much as it's a series of thoughts about Spiritwrak,
most of them related to game design, specifically poor--or, at least, no
longer acceptable, game design. While there are things to like about
Spiritwrak, there are also plenty of things for game authors to avoid,
IMO.

First: that damn transportation system, both tedious--usually at least
twenty turns wasted getting from one area to another--and unfair, in that
it's not really so terribly hard to run out of coins. Sure, if you do the
bank puzzle early on, it's probably not a problem, but if you don't,
you're apt to end up stuck somewhere. The irritating thing is that the
author seemed to build in a shortcut, namely the huncho spell--which, a la
Beyond Zork, should let you move from place to place pretty quickly via
the Ethereal Plane--but (a) you don't get access to that shortcut until
the end of the game, and (b) you need all four rods to use the huncho
spell, and players lose the four rods shortly after collecting all four of
them. (You can still get to the Ethereal Plane via the gating device
thing, but that's not exactly handy.) If access to the shortcut had come
along much earlier in the game, the subway would have been bearable; as it
is, it's a major nuisance.

Second, did anyone else find it odd that the quest itself--at least,
collecting the four rods--was strikingly less interesting than the puzzles
you solve to get there? I guess I'm reacting mostly to the way you get rid
of the evil nasty spirits, i.e., cast the same spell on each one. The
spirits themselves are guarded by some fun (even if highly artificial
puzzles)--the layers of wood beams, the trophy puzzle--but the spirits are
pretty wimpy. This struck me as peculiar.

The bag of holding--either the fur sack or, bizarrely, a flowerpot--was a
welcome touch, but it came along way too late. I was juggling objects long
before I found either of the "holding" objects. Moral: if you're going to
sacrifice realism to avoid inventory management puzzles, do it _right
away_. Dammit.

Mind-reading: a little too much of it. The ZEMDOR spell (triplicate) is
neat, but how I should have known to cast it on the cereal box, and how I
should have anticipated that the box would turn into three _different_
boxes, well, I dunno. The hide-the-rod-in-the-foundation-of-