Limerick Quest is the sequel to last year’s Limerick Heist; it even picks up where Limerick Heist left off. Like its predecessor, Limerick Quest is told entirely in limericks.
I remember a lot of buzz about Limerick Heist last year – it was such a fresh concept and so well-executed – but I haven’t seen many people talking about Limerick Quest this year. Perhaps that’s because folks think author Pace Smith is just doing the same thing again. If so, they are wrong.
While we do see the limericks (of course) and Verge, one of the characters from the original game, Limerick Quest contains several features not seen in Limerick Heist. These include a world map, inventory, and some item-based puzzles – making it feel more like a typical parser game and less like the kind of game you normally see in Twine. (Others have been pushing Twine’s boundaries in this direction, though – Agnieszka Trzaska’s Chuk and the Arena, which took third place in IFComp last year, being a notable example.) Limerick Heist plays with heist movie tropes, too, while Limerick Quest plays with adventure film tropes, such as those seen in the Indiana Jones movies. It’s all enough variation and innovation on the original theme to make Limerick Quest a worthy sequel rather than simply a rehash of what was enjoyable about the first game.
The inventory and puzzles deserve more mention. Remember that everything in Limerick Quest is in limerick form – not just the story, but the credits, the achievement list, and the game options, too. The inventory list is also in limerick form. When you consider all the possible combinations of items that might or might not be in a player’s inventory at a particular time (for those who care, it’s 2 to the power of the number of items in the game), you’re looking at a fantastic amount of work that must have gone into making sure the player sees a limerick every time they check what they’re carrying. The major puzzles also fit the game’s theme, progressively teaching the player how to write limericks via challenges that entail counting syllables and word lengths, fixing a faulty limerick, and ultimately creating a complete limerick. All in all, Limerick Quest is an impressively designed and executed game.
I can think of little to criticize about Limerick Quest. The inability to save, I suppose, so that the player could try some different things without replaying the entire game. (For example, I had some trouble with the final optional puzzle on the mine cart. I thought I knew what to do but wasn’t sure how to input my solution. Once I got it wrong, the lack of a “save game” option meant that I couldn’t go back and easily retry the puzzle once I had refreshed the browser. (*)) Other that that, I could say that I would have liked a larger game world or more puzzles. Perhaps I could say that a few parts of the worldbuilding seem to exist mostly to make the limericks work. But when I actually look, overall, at what Limerick Quest attempted, plus how well it succeeded, these concerns seem finicky. It’s one of the best games I’ve seen thus far in this IFComp.
(Disclaimer: We played most of the first act of Limerick Quest at the Seattle IF meetup a few days ago, with author Pace Smith reading. I played the rest of it myself earlier today. I could still hear Pace’s voice in my head as I read new limericks.)
(*) Added: It turns out you can go back and retry the puzzle easily, as I discovered over a month later when replaying Limerick Quest with my son. In the game options, you can disable the timer. Plus having won the game allows you to jump back to the beginning of any of the chapters and play from there.
An Exercise for the Reader 