The Wizard Sniffer

Last updated
The Wizard Sniffer
The Wizard Sniffer cover thumbnail.png
Cover art
Developer(s) Buster Hudson
Engine Inform 7
Release1 October 2017
Genre(s) fantasy, comedy
Mode(s) single-player

The Wizard Sniffer is a 2017 interactive fiction fantasy comedy game by Buster Hudson. [1]

Contents

The Wizard Sniffer was Hudson's seventh game published in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and is, as of 2023, his latest game, not counting Cragne Manor (2018) [2] which has 84 collaborating authors.

The game was well received, it won several awards, and the hint system was particularly praised.

Plot

[Ser Leonhart] prods you forward with the side of his boot, and you let out a disgruntled oink. To think you had successfully escaped this place the night before last, only to be brought back again. Well, it could be worse. You could be bacon.

– The pig,The Wizard Sniffer by Buster Hudson, from the introduction.

The player controls a pig who has been acquired by the knight Ser Leonhart and his squire Tuck who believes the pig is able to recognize wizards by their smell. [1] The trio searches for a shapeshifting wizard [1] in a fortress guarded by a playful dragon.

Early in the game it pokes fun at old puzzle tropes found festering in a rubbish bin beneath a cloud of flies: "a stack of discs with three wooden rods on a stand", "a sliding set of tiles numbered one through fifteen", "a scale with many coins", "a pair of jugs (one 5-pint and one 3-pint)", "several heavy blocks and pressure plates", and "a book of riddles".

The hint system consists of two fleas below the pig's ear which drop clues where one clue is true and one clue is false. [1]

Development and form

The game is a "limited parser", meaning that the list of actions is short and defined. [3]

Hudson said that a character connected to a puzzle might once have acted more as a key or a door rather than a fully developed person, but that puzzles now instead exist because of the people, and that the puzzles help the player spend time with the characters. [3]

The game was developed in Inform 7 and is Freeware. [1]

Reception

Sarah Laskow wrote about The Wizard Sniffer in Atlas Obscura and described it as a slapstick comedy of errors, with bumbling heroes, marriages of convenience, and affectionate monsters guarding surprising secrets. She wrote that as parser games go, it was welcoming to newcomers. The text also contained a brief interview with Hudson about the game. [3]

Lynda Clark called the game a wonderful comedic game in the vein of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. She was particularly impressed by the characterization of the pig's companions Ser Leonhart and Tuck, and how their bumbling idiocy was not only funny but also that any frustrations due to player or parser inadequacy was instead directed at them, rather than the game itself. She wrote that "the hint system is ingeniously gamified in a way which fits the tone of the game". [4]

In the top review for the game at Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), game designer Chandler Groover praised Hudson for the clever puzzles and for further improving on the hint systems from Hudson's earlier games Oppositely Opal (2015) and Foo Foo (2016) and here rising it to the next level in which it became its own puzzle. Groover wrote "Players don't feel like they had to give up by using it. Instead, they're rewarded with more jokes, more characters, more story." and "[The fleas'] influence permeates the game, allows it to sprawl as much as it does." Groover wrote about the plot that "This isn't just a silly story about transformative magic: it's a story about how identities transform too, and how they sometimes don't, and sometimes should, and sometimes shouldn't." Groover noted that other reviewers had compared the game to Monty Python and the Holy Grail , but suggested some elements could be compared to Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream . Groover also suggested that some drawbacks of the game were long prose passages and some pop culture jokes that he feared would date the text and make it less timeless. [5]

Mike Spivey wrote that "Writing farce is like a figure skater launching into a spin: It’s easy to overdo it or underdo it [...] The Wizard Sniffer nails it, though, in a spiraling cascade of zaniness". [5] He praised the game for clever and well-integrated puzzles as well as the pacing. He appreciated how Hudson avoided going for laughs within the text and instead allowing humor arising from the discrepancy between the crazy action and the straight man descriptions of it. He wrote that the game reminded him of a 1930s screwball comedy or a classic Looney Tunes cartoon, and ended the review with "I've never laughed so much playing an IF game." [5]

Hanon Ondricek called it a stellar follow up to Hudson's game Oppositely Opal.

In the 135:nd episode of The Short Game, The Wizard Sniffer was described as having a funny fantastical premise, that the writing was "absolutely wonderful" and "hysterical", with really clever puzzle action, well delivered story, and that the game was suitable both to seasoned interactive fiction gamers as well as those new to the genre. [6] The review also praised the hint system. [6]

Awards and recognition

The game won five awards in the 2017 XYZZY Awards: "Best game", "Best story", "Best NPCs", "Best individual puzzle" (Getting past the dragon), and "Best individual NPC" (Squire Tuck). It was also nominated in the category "Best Puzzles", but lost to The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. [1]

The game won two awards in the 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition: 1st place overall and 1st place Miss Congeniality Award. [1]

The game is (2023) listed as the #8 game in the IFDB Top 100, [7] and was voted #10 (tie) top Interactive Fiction of All Time in a September 2023 vote among members. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.

Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it, but longer games are allowed entry. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.

<i>Zork</i> 1977 video game

Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.

<i>Starship Titanic</i> 1998 video game

Starship Titanic is an adventure game developed by The Digital Village and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. It was released in April 1998 for Microsoft Windows and in March 1999 for Apple Macintosh. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters.

<i>Photopia</i> 1998 video game

Photopia is a piece of literature by Adam Cadre rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. It has received both praise and criticism for its heavy focus on fiction rather than on interactivity. It won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. Photopia has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity.

The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.

<i>Blue Chairs</i> 2004 video game

Blue Chairs is an interactive fiction game by American author Chris Klimas.

<i>Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur</i> 1989 video game

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur is an illustrated interactive fiction video game written by Bob Bates and published by Infocom in 1989. It was released for the Apple II, Amiga, Mac, and IBM PC compatibles. Atypically for an Infocom product, it shows illustrations of locations, characters and objects within the game. It is Infocom's thirty-fourth game and is the second of two Infocom games developed by Challenge using Infocom's development tools.

<i>Journey</i> (1989 video game) 1989 video game

Journey: The Quest Begins is an interactive fiction video game designed by Marc Blank, with illustrations by Donald Langosy, and released by Infocom in 1989. Like the majority of Infocom's works, it was released simultaneously for several popular computer platforms, such as the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC compatibles. Journey is unusual among Infocom games in that it could be played entirely via mouse or joystick, with no typing required. It was the thirty-fifth and last game released by Infocom before parent company Activision closed the Cambridge office, effectively reducing Infocom to a "label" to be applied to later games.

Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.

<i>Anchorhead</i> 1998 video game

Anchorhead is a Lovecraftian horror interactive fiction game, originally written and published by Michael S. Gentry in 1998. The game is heavily inspired by the works and writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the Cthulhu mythos.

<i>Erik the Viking</i> (video game) 1984 video game

The Saga of Erik the Viking is a text-based adventure video game developed by Level 9 Computing and published by Mosaic Publishing in 1984. The game runs on the Amstrad CPC, BBC model B, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum.

<i>Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull</i> 2007 video game

Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull is the 17th installment in the Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure game series by Her Interactive. It is available for play on Microsoft Windows platforms. It has an ESRB rating of E for moments of mild violence and peril. Players take on the first-person view of fictional amateur sleuth Nancy Drew and must solve the mystery through interrogation of suspects, solving puzzles, and discovering clues. There are two levels of gameplay, Junior and Senior detective modes, each offering a different difficulty level of puzzles and hints, however neither of these changes affect the plot of the game. The game is loosely based on the book The Mardi Gras Mystery (1988).

<i>Wonderland</i> (video game) 1990 video game

Wonderland, published in 1990 by Virgin Games, is an interactive fiction game developed by Magnetic Scrolls based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. While playing as Alice, the player goes on a journey solving puzzles in order to find the way back home from Wonderland. With hundreds of locations to explore, the game introduced characters from the original book to guide the journey through Wonderland. First introducing the magnetic windows system, Wonderland received positive reviews upon release.

<i>Lost Pig</i> 2007 video game

Lost Pig is a comedic work of interactive fiction about an orc retrieving an escaped pig. It was created by Admiral Jota and released as freeware. It took first place in the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition with an average score of 8.27. Lost Pig won best game, best writing, best individual non-player character, and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards. Lost Pig finished with 18.7% of the votes for the Audience Award in the interactive fiction category in the 2008 Jay Is Games Best of Casual Gameplay awards, placing it second after Violet.

<i>Cypher</i> (video game) 2012 video game

Cypher: Cyberpunk Text Adventure is a cyberpunk interactive fiction video game written by the Cabrera Brothers and released on August 31, 2012. It includes music, sound effects and limited graphical elements. The game was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X.

<i>Cryptozookeeper</i> 2011 interactive fiction video game

Cryptozookeeper is an interactive fiction game written and self-published by American developer Robb Sherwin in 2011. Cryptozookeeper was written in the cross-platform language Hugo and runs on Windows, Macintosh OS-X, and Linux computers. Cryptozookeeper was released under a Creative Commons license and contains more than 12 hours of game play.

Counterfeit Monkey is a 2012 interactive fiction espionage game by Emily Short.

The Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a database of metadata and reviews of interactive fiction.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "The Wizard Sniffer" at the Interactive Fiction Database.
  2. ↑ "Results for author:Buster Hudson", ifdb.org.
  3. 1 2 3 Sarah Laskow. "Welcome to Interactive Fiction: You're a Wizard-Sniffing Pig", Atlas Obscura , 1 December 2017.
  4. ↑ Lynda Clark. "Sniffing Wizards", medium.com, 17 December 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 "The Wizard Sniffer (All reviews)" at the Interactive Fiction Database.
  6. 1 2 Raygan Kelly, Laura Nash, Shane Kelly, Nate Heininger. "135: IFComp 2017 pt. 1" mp3 (at 27m41s), The Short Game, 18 October 2017.
  7. ↑ "IFDB Top 100" (archived), ifdb.org, 13 November 2023.
  8. ↑ "Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition)", ifdb.org, 15 September 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.