Marina Diagourta
Played 2024-09-21, IFComp 2024

An epic with unusual rough edges

I was genuinely excited once I saw the ambition and structure of this one, and so extra disappointed to hit my second game-breaking bug of the evening.

I'd managed to do a little exploring, made some progress on the key puzzle in Thebes but was feeling stuck so I decided to go try something else. I head from Kadmea back to the Agora of Thebes, and then:

Agora of Thebes
The Agora of Thebes, is a bustling marketplace and social center. It is a hub of activity, where citizens gather to trade, discuss politics, and engage in religious ceremonies.

Unlike the Agora of Athens, which is dominated by the Doric architectural style, the Agora of Thebes is showcasing a more diverse range of styles. While some buildings feature Doric columns, others incorporate Ionic or Corinthian elements.

Known adjacent locations:
→Kadmea (U)
→Gates of Thebes (S)

> s
You can't go that way.

Uh-oh.

> gates
That's not a verb I recognise.

> go south
You can't go that way.

> exits
That's not a verb I recognise.

> w
You can't go that way.

> e
You can't go that way.

> n
You can't go that way.

Seems I'm trapped in this corner of the map, and am quitting at 0/243 points. :sweat:

But look, I really was interested in what this promised. Zipping around ancient Greece at mythic speed, saving the pantheon by solving cryptic puzzles in places of significance with some tourist appeal… this *sounds* great.

As for what I did manage to play:

This would benefit from a bit more of an *in medias res* opening - there's a lot of text that doesn't establish a goal, then a few empty turns, then the inciting incident happens and then we wake up and get more exposition and are finally set loose. Collapse that all into the moment we wake up!

There's a typo in that early scene - I believe this should say “Heracles' club:”

You grab Heracle's club out of his hands and leap towards Kronos.

I went to Athens first, found the torch puzzle but found the cryptograms challenging enough that they might be “fake” and require progress elsewhere. So I headed to Thebes where I got as far as finding the labeled weights and trying several sequences on the scale-lock. Maybe my brain just wasn't working, but this seemed like an underspecified puzzle. The riddle is “From the lightest touch to the heaviest step” and the weights are labeled (Sword, Spear, Shield, Snake, Owl, Horse). So here I am searching online trying to figure out which is heaviest, an owl , a spear, or a sword, and discovering that there isn't really an answer to that question because these objects vary and their typical weight ranges overlap significantly. So either I'm down to guessing, or the riddle is referring to something entirely besides weight. I don't know what. Odds of inciting violence? Levenshtein distance? No hint system and no walkthrough that I can find, hence I decided to try something else and hit the navigation bug that ended my run.

The whole thing feels brimming with promise and badly in need of playtesting. I hope it gets fixed up so I can see the rest!