[IFComp2012] Changes

[runnerchild]

It's been a while... my real life has kept me incredibly busy for the past two weeks. Last night I finally found time to play another game, though. This time: Changes, by David Given.

Comments

[rose_garden]

I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.

[maga_dogg]

A big part of the trouble was that the actions of the player only made sense in retrospect, and didn't seem like logical steps to get me to my goal...

...I think it would have been much more intuitive how to progress through the game if there had been inherent value in being the otter and the fox.

For me, this was a very meta-game kind of realisation: 'oh, *right*, I can kill animals to take on their bodies, so I'll need to get the otter for swimming and the beavers for cutting down trees and the fox for killing something or other, and this will ultimately lead to getting the lemur and his button-pressing abilities. I'll just go around killing things and trust that this will somehow equip me to get the lemur.'

Early on, this matched up nicely with in-character motives, because my biggest concern there was to become anything less useless than a rabbit, to avoid getting constantly bothered by that goddamn fox. And so on -- it felt as though there was always a fairly decent immediate motivation to do the next thing, even if the whole

[runnerchild]

It was meta-game-y to me, too - I realized early on that I wanted to be the lemur and that I would probably have to go through multiple animals to get there. But I didn't like that meta-game moment, because it pulled me out of the story. In a "realistic" (and I realize that's an absurd word to use here) sense, going around killing things and changing into them would seem like a poor strategy - because maybe being a fox would actually make it harder for me to get to the lemur and I'd realize later I needed to dive for something, for example. I felt safe making those changes as a game-player, because I know how games work - but shouldn't have felt safe moving on just for the sake of moving on if I'd been a real stranded astronaut.