(a few mild spoilers)
Once past the introduction, the first character you meet in The Libonotus Cup is your trusty parrot Virgé. There’s a parrot featured prominently in last year’s fifth place IFComp game, The Magpie Takes the Train, as well as a character named Verge in last year’s fourth place game, Limerick Quest. I immediately thought, “Is this game going to reference a bunch of past IFComp games?” Once I had that frame in my head, I couldn’t shake it; I kept looking for IF references in The Libonotus Cup. I don’t know whether the examples I’m going to cite later are legitimate references, but you know how it is when you have something on the brain: You start seeing examples of it everywhere.
The story in The Libonotus Cup is that you’ve made a bet with a friend that you can beat him in a pirate ship race. Since you’re a pirate, though, you value gold above all else. This setup results in The Libonotus Cup being a two-part game consisting of a melange of three different game types. The first part features traditional puzzles, in which the overarching goal is to make your ship race-worthy. The second part of the game is the race itself, in which you can either focus on winning the contest or collecting as much money as possible along the way. There are also a few puzzles to solve during the race. So The Libonotus Cup is a puzzlefest, a racing game, and an optimization game. To a certain degree you can decide what your goals are with the game: Spend more time early on solving puzzles (which puts your ship in a better position for the race), focus on winning the race, focus on collecting doubloons, or some combination of the above. This setup also encourages multiple playthroughs. I played through twice, finishing third (out of five) in the race and collecting 2065 doubloons the first time, and then collecting 2665 doubloons and finishing second the next playthrough.
At that point I had had my fill, though. I kind of wanted to see if I could increase my haul, and I really wanted to try to win the race, but I didn’t want to do either of these enough to repeat a lot of the same commands and puzzles, especially the extended sequence in the middle of the race that requires some puzzle-solving and that, apparently, you can’t avoid. You can save your game, and that helps, but if you want to redo the race you’ve got to redo that entire sequence. Since there’s really no reason to solve it more than once, the game would be more streamlined and thus more likely to entice the player to further playthroughs if it had resulted in the player acquiring some information (like a code word or something) that could be used to bypass the sequence after solving it for the first time. The other aspect of the game that discouraged me from trying again is that I couldn’t fully tell what did or didn’t help me win the race. On my second playthrough I tried to be as efficient as I could, but I still placed second.
There’s a sly humor to The Libonotus Cup—the same style of humor, actually, that I remember from The Secret of Monkey Island (also a pirate game!). I didn’t catch any arrr-style puns, surprisingly, but (for example) the twist on the whole fool-’em-with-a-fake-beard trick was amusing, as was the realization that I had unknowingly been the agent of a voodoo curse aimed at me. (I managed to pull a switcheroo on my second playthrough so that someone else became the victim, but I didn’t see any noticeable effect on the game from that.) I was also surprised to see a few mathematical digressions.
Back to the IF references… You begin the game in a tavern, just like Tavern Crawler; at one point you find yourself on the deck of a ship, like The Impossible Bottle; there’s a puzzle in which you have to match rhymes, like Limerick Quest; there’s a scene out of Greek mythology, which could be a nod to the setting of The Eleusinian Miseries; and the solution to the maze puzzle is reminiscent of the solution to the maze puzzle in Stuff of Legend. And that’s just IFComp from last year! The goal of maximizing your gold reminded me of Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder, which is also an optimization game set on a pirate ship. And even the bayou could be a reference to my own Sugarlawn, another optimization game (from IFComp 2019). Maybe these are all coincidences, though, brought on by my “look for IF references” switch getting flipped at the start of The Libonotus Cup.
Overall, I enjoyed The Libonotus Cup quite a bit. It plays smoothly, and its mix of different game types felt fresh. The main improvement I would suggest would be to streamline some parts of the game that can’t be avoided, especially the sequence in the middle of the race, to encourage more playthroughs. More options for maximizing your gold, as well as more clarity on which actions help or hurt most with respect to winning the race, would also make the game better. But I certainly had a good time during my two playthroughs.
An Exercise for the Reader 