Kai Oyinloye. 9th place, IFComp 2022.

This is my jam! I love a good adventure. Pricess of Vestria hits lots of low-fantasy notes by letting me dig through the library of a royal castle for a dusty tome, hide among the common folk in disguise, foil a petty thief, befriend a scoundrel, enjoy the hospitality of a nomadic people, and battle a witch through a dark forest. It doesn’t have a crunchy combat system or elaborate inventory management or much contemplative puzzling, but it also feels more invested in my choices than its own story: I’m choosing what to risk, and when. There are hard failures that cost a life and make me replay a scene for a better outcome, and soft failures that may continue the story but lock me out of significant content later. This felt like a great balance for an adventure. I was invested in keeping the princess safe and well-equipped on her journey, and felt like I got to deploy knowledge of adventure tropes to succeed.

PoV brought to mind lots of other games and stories that I love, like The Princess Bride and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! I think the comparison cuts both ways. On one hand, it’s executed well so the similarities garnered a lot of good will from me, and any borrowed scenes or characters are sufficiently remixed here that it didn’t feel derivative. On the other hand, those stories I love have a few iconic moments that stick in my memory, and I’m already a little worried that nothing in PoV is going to stick quite as well. I mentioned some of the better moments above, but didn’t come away with a “Cliffs of Insanity” or a “Helping Hands” or a “King Théoden and Wormtongue.” It’s funny to say but I wish the story was just a little weirder. But the fact that I want to draw these comparisons is a good sign.

Something I was especially impressed by was the confrontation with the witch at the end. There is a satisfying magic-logic complexity to the situation that lent itself to thinking through options and replaying to try a few things, and has a lot in common with the last act of The Thirty Nine Steps. I have a magic-proof cloak but am vulnerable to, say, debris from nearby lightning strikes. She has a shield that requires her active attention. It seems like this sort of boss fight is very tough to do well: Where you talk and think and maneuver your way to victory, and where it also feels like a culmination of past choices. It works great here.

Also, the witch seems to be a well-motivated character, if I’m reading between the lines correctly. I didn’t actually get the ending that reveals a motivation. I suspected she was the birth-mother of the Wolds, but bringing this up didn’t seem to be an option in the confrontation (maybe because I didn’t make it into the secret room in their manor house). This little disconnect between player-knowledge and character-knowledge was unusual within the game and a little jarring right at the end. Or maybe I guessed wrong!

One more nit: The game introduced a luck stat at the beginning, but I never saw it come into play. It’s always a bummer when a mechanic seems to go unused.

Anyway, it was a great hour or so of adventuring!