Lenard Gunda. 22nd place, IFComp 2022.

Tidy.

I had great fun with Lazy Wizard’s Guide. I had to pause mid-game, and happily returned and finished it the same evening, getting my license without hints but leaving two achievements unachieved. (I never did get through those rosebushes.) The setup is Hogwarts-without-serial-numbers: We’re the laziest student in a wizarding school with a great dining hall, potions classroom, greenhouse, dungeon, and a nearby wizarding village. We meet ghosts and trolls, and there might be mermaids in the lake. We even take a painting into the girls’ dormitory (though it’s not a secret door).

Spells themselves are easy to learn and easy to cast, but getting at the right components can be a trick; the puzzle structure of the game is mostly a knot to untie, as you constantly check your growing list of spells and look for missing reagents in a growing explorable space, looking for the next loose thread to pull. This works well, and feels pretty tightly controlled; I felt that there were rarely more than two or three pullable threads at any moment, and the game has some “advance the plot” moments that update the world-state to unlock some more (you can’t get into the yard until Act 2; you can’t get vinegar or get into the teacher’s lounge until you trigger Act 3).

I really got stuck once, looking for a magnet. It’s stuck to the back of a magnetic whiteboard in a suspiciously empty room, with an NPC that mentions there must be a magnet nearby. But in a slightly frustrating implementation choice that shows up a few times, some items don’t appear in the room until you search for them in the right way, so X WHITEBOARD and SEARCH WHITEBOARD and LOOK UNDER WHITEBOARD yielded nothing, while LOOK BEHIND WHITEBOARD was the critical command. This is doubly awkward because by UNDER WHITEBOARD I meant to search the backside of the whiteboard; presumably anything on the floor beneath it would be in the room description. There’s a similar issue looking for runes near a gargoyle, where the trick seems to be LOOK UNDER GARGOYLE but of course you can’t lift it; is the idea that we just glance down for the first time? Generally speaking I don’t find “examine correctly” puzzles that interesting.

But despite that bump the game is clued quite well. It also has an elegant layer of polish in the form of the Exam Jinn, who both acts as an in-world hint system and a safety belt for the player, magically undoing any fatal disasters. I took advantage of this last ability a few times experimenting with the exploding bubbles, and it was quite smooth.

Another thing that’s quite well designed is that the game feels complete, but I can also see hooks where the author could keep expanding it. There are a few places where an NPC just gives you what you need, where a LeChuck’s Revenge-style hard mode would instead indirect to yet another quest. I really thought the paintings would lead to a more complex puzzle too, making us do some clever one-way hopping between locations as other routes became inaccessible. I’d also have loved some more NPC reactions to casting spells in their presence - if nothing else, it feels like exploding bubbles should have gotten a bigger reaction a few times. But this just illustrates how the game got my imagination working. What’s here is a great friendly puzzlefest. I’m just saying I’d probably play it over again if there happened to be a post-comp release with a challenge mode :slight_smile: