Quest ReQuest: Psychology "Quest"

I recently unearthed the Shockwave Flash file that can play Alora Fane: Creation quests!!

Many years ago, around 2013 or so, I was a beta tester of an unreleased RPG creation engine referred to as DreamQuest and later rebranded to Alofa Fane: Creation. Being a member of a small and selectively-chosen community, other testers on the site and I would make quests and share them with each other and I wound up making a surprising number of them. Most of them are really bad and there's a lot of really embarrassing stuff in there!

Clearly this is not one of them.

Yesterday I played some of my old quests on a whim and realized I could actually easily record them and upload them to YT, so I figured why not write about it while I'm at it?

In these Quest ReQuest blogs I'll be playing some of my old quests and generally reflecting on my current feeling on them as well as what inspired me to make them back in 2013. Some of these quests got pretty experimental and a few go on rather long too, and before I knew it I'd built a loosely connected setting featuring a suspicious amount of gay Goblins and Ogres!

I believe this was the first of my "Quest" series of quests, a series of quests revolving around a certain theme, idea or concept. The idea for this one was pretentious psychological games that leave everything up to interpretation! The later ones would get much more ambitious, but we'll see about those when we get there!

The dialogue is mostly gibberish, plot points fly by left and right with no rhyme or reason and the game is constantly shifting moods! It's short, to-the-point, very much on-the-nose, tongue-in-cheek and it probably thinks it's funnier than it actually is!

What I like about this one is how mercifully short it is! There's only about 4 character props, not that many screens or conversations, but I think it still conveys a sense of complete garbled nonsense posing as being meaningful rather well. I even made some LUDONARRATIVE CONSONANCE by making it so you need to follow the antagonist's advice to knock yourself out when fighting it, by literally using a physical attack on yourself. The antagonist even enchants your physical attack to be super effective against yourself, wowzers!

SECRET SORROWLAD IX SPOILERS

Curiously enough, I seem to have taken a liking to these characters enough for them to  recur throughout my other games! The narrator winds up being an antagonistic force trying to tear apart a Good Human Paladin and Evil Goblin Shaman couple (gay couple of course!!) and all three of them also were to continuously appear as nonsensical easter eggs in my Sorrowlad series of quests, with "Player" being renamed to Aghnostic! I'll talk more about those when I get there, hopefully!

Honestly, of my oldest quests, this is probably the best one!