COMPLETE: Stair Quest SE

[kjorteo]

My inaugural game for this "steal xyzzysqrl's game writeups" idea is a lovely little indie gem from No More For Today productions, a name I am convinced is part of the joke (since you have to see that big NO MORE FOR TODAY logo with that stupid owl every time you restart, as if to mock you further.) It's a fond nostalgic recollection of classic adventure gaming... and by that I mean they took davidn's favorite part of King's Quest III and made an over the top parody of it.

The trailer sums it up perfectly, really.

Anyway, I'd beaten this one before, but I was compelled to go back and try it again when I heard they'd made a SPECIAL EDITION with two new rooms and one new obstacle in one of the existing rooms. Actually playing through to completion goes through this cycle where it takes that "okay this is incredible" feeling you probably got from watching the trailer, then keeps going until the joke starts to wear a bit thin, then keeps going even further until it wraps around the other side and becomes amazing again. The stairs become all, and all become stairs. Stairs start to consume your every thought and then things really can get interesting. Also, it is 100% worth it for the ending.

Also, I beat this game twice (normal and SE) without realizing you could move diagonally. That would have been really good to know in the SE yeti room, which I instead just barely cleared by gratuitously abusing the skidding mechanic, drift-boosting around every corner like one of those infuriating online pro Mario Kart players who actually bothered to get unstoppably good at the game even though it's fucking Mario Kart.

Anyway. Stairs.

Comments

[davidn]

I hadn't realized until very recently that the owl logo for No More For Today is, of course, meant to be Cedric rendered in the Sierra logo style (the game authors having something of an in-joke with him, up to and including creating a CyberCedric persona to harass one of their team).

Out of curiosity, did you ever move diagonally in a King's Quest game? Because that was fairly vital to survival in KQ3! This game, much like Gloryhammer to Luca Turilli, occupies a unique place where it's clearly exaggerated parody while at the same time just being exactly what King's Quest was like.

And how on earth did you prompt that response from the game!

[kjorteo]

I was speaking to Andrew the other day (creator of Farnham Fables, since we've become friends by this point) and he pointed out something amazing: there's an audio glitch in King's Quest 5 where if you run the DOS version while the CD version is inserted, it just pulls audio from God only knows where at random every time anyone is speaking, to about the results you would expect. It would be the most obscure reference in the world to name your entire company after this, but... starting at 6:22 or so, between it being Cedric and it being right when you fall to your death, that can't be coincidence!

I never moved diagonally in a King's Quest game, but I never got far enough for that to have been an issue--I always got stuck on other stuff anyway. I didn't even make it out of Manannan's house in KQ3!

The command for that response is "seduce stairs" :D I was in a mood to see whatever kind of lewd things I could try because of course I was (like I said in that tweet, if you're making a game, never let me of all people play it.) While this game surprisingly does recognize verb phrases like "flirt with," I'm usually conditioned by early text parser games to avoid any verb that involves more than one word. Therefore, I was just going through every single-word synonym I could think of for anything along those lines... "seduce" was the second one I thought of after "fuck" (which just catches the general cursing/profanity reaction) and just before "yiff" (which is unrecognized.)

[davidn]

That "no more for today" in an Eastern European accent is incredible :) That definitely has to be where they got it from!

glad you liked it

[wilcoweb]

it was a lot of fun to make :)

Re: glad you liked it

[kjorteo]

Thank you for making it! I can tell that someone definitely had fun with the premise and room design (THE CAT ROOM oh my God,) coming up with all the text parser reactions, etc.

Re: glad you liked it

[wilcoweb]

Hahaha. Myself and one other artist (Chris Ushko) made the rooms with some suggestions from others on what to make. We had several folks writing the hundreds of parser interactions. Most of the room animations added to the previous locations were done by Chris.

And I'm thrilled you liked the cat room. The wife requested I put a unicorn in it, and my daughter wanted the lion.