Re: Dragon

"Re: Dragon" is a short little piece that springs from last year's "The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now", with the meta premise being that we are the organiser of last year's IFcomp (or IFFcomp here, though I think I missed what the second F is for) and we are being sued by a representative of an organisation of dragon oracles for the defamation that occurred because of that game. This being a world with magic, we're eventually given a window into the event that inspired the 2017 game. Time being malleable (and this being the author's meta goal all along) we wind up changing the past to give that game an actual ending.

This game absolutely needs to be run in a browser: the gblorb file produces something very much like gibberish when run through GIT, but resolves into a simulation of an email client when played online. There are some pretty neat effects going on here, so full points for presentation.

As might be expected, it's a bit of a comedy game. The dragon's representative is suitably over-the-top, and we've apparently got an email from an entrant whose entry involves physical objects, including cheeses. Some of the comedy stems from our dragon oracle's exasperation with people trying to tell their own fortunes, much as a doctor might be exasperated by people trying to diagnose themselves with "something they read online." The game itself is played via a choice structure, once we've been given that window onto the past: otherwise, it's just a matter of receiving emails and reading them.

There's not a lot of branching involved. Things pretty much converge back onto the main storyline within half a page, at that; and the only "puzzles" basically consist of "read all these things to continue. That said, the format does give an illusion of interactivity, even if, in hindsight, there isn't actually a lot of it. Ultimately, the thing we need to resolve is the question of why the door wouldn't open for the dragon's client, and I think it would have been more interesting if there were multiple possible reasons for that, and multiple ways of fixing it.

This is clearly one of those breakfasts cleverly created from yesterday's leftovers. You could probably make a Saturday morning kedgeree from Friday night's fish fry, for instance. Yes. Kedgeree. With chamomile tea to finish.