In Tangled Tales you wake up as Prince Charming (*), hung over and lost in the forest after a wild bachelor party. With a grumpy Rumpelstiltskin as your companion, you’ll have to help, best, or manipulate several classic fairy tale characters in order to make it to the wedding on time.
Tangled Tales features a custom parser and interface by JimJams, an indie company that makes retro games. According to their website, their previous published works include a shoot-em-up arcade game, a platformer, and at least one other text adventure.
One of the noteworthy aspects of Tangled Tales is its interface. I was impressed with it when I started the game, as it features a set of menu options and attractive artwork that looks like a painting on canvas. Many locations in the game have their own art in this style, and they are pulled up on screen the first time you enter one of these locations. Unfortunately, they also cover up most of the text, so that as you’re admiring a forest scene you can see several paragraphs of text scrolling behind it. An improvement here would be to keep the text and images in separate parts of the screen.
The story mostly consists of several traditional fairy tales cobbled together, in a King’s Quest sort of way. Often you’ll find yourself in the middle of one of these tales, frequently having to fix the problems created by the characters in the story. Much of all of this is topsy-turvy as well: Sometimes the villains are not so villainous, sometimes the “good” characters are rather greedy, and sometimes you get to mash two fairy tales together, with amusing results. There are also lots of locations in which nothing happens and paths that lead to dead ends. While these aren’t that common in parser IF anymore, they do help create the feeling of wandering around lost in the woods instead of just following a sequenced track of puzzles.
My major critique of Tangled Tales — and it’s a rather large one — is that the parser is quite weak. Objects that are described as “open” can’t be closed, responses are often vague or misleading, reasonable synonyms frequently aren’t allowed, and sometimes a synonym will work in one context but won’t in another. In fact, an early instance of parser problems almost led me to give up on the game. I kept being told I was thirsty, so I tried DRINK WATER at the river I found. But the game wouldn’t let me, and its response was rather generic. So I thought it wanted a different solution. After getting nowhere for a while I went to the walkthrough, only to discover that it says to DRINK WATER as soon as you reach the river! At this point I almost gave up in frustration, as I feared I wouldn’t be able to trust the game or the walkthrough. However, a couple of other reviewers indicated that they had managed to complete Tangled Tales, so I thought I would give it another try. It turns out that you have to fill the container you find with water, and then DRINK WATER works (which is the opposite order that the walkthrough has these two commands). I then played through the rest of the game, but I did frequently refer to the walkthrough to avoid similar problems in the future. (There’s no UNDO, and I could find only one save slot. I was fearful of putting myself in an unwinnable state after placing an object inside a container and not being able to get it back out.)
Interestingly enough, the walkthrough is part of a fairly extensive game manual that feels like those Infocom put together back in the 1980s. That manual indicates that Tangled Tales‘s parser accepts some rather complicated input, allowing for indirect objects, commands to other characters, multiple actions on the same command line, and even adverbs. I didn’t test most of these (and I never saw a need for adverbs), but it’s rather ambitious. That’s commendable, but the parser still needs to handle appropriately a lot of the nuts-and-bolts kind of things that I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Tangled Tales does have inventory limits in the form of weight capacities, but Rumpelstiltskin can carry anything for you, so that’s easily overcome. He can also perform actions for you with the objects he’s carrying, which is nice. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to examine him to remind myself which of my objects he’s carrying; that would have been a welcome feature.
Overall, Tangled Tales twists and weaves several classic fairy tales into a single story, much like Shrek or Into the Woods. It has some enjoyable and even ambitious aspects, but its weak parser detracted greatly from my experience of the game.
(* I played as Prince Charming. You also have the option of playing as Cinderella, which appears to give almost identical gameplay.)
An Exercise for the Reader 