The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested in interactive storytelling, you should check it out!

Working Ogre-Time is the fifth competition entry I’m covering. For an overview of what I’m especially looking for in gamebooks, please refer to my coverage of the first entry, The House on Happy Hill.

***

Ogre-Time tells story of ogre. Ogre busy checking traps in dungeon. Traps good for killing aventu avunte dentuva heroes. Ogre-Time very realistic. Good book. At least that’s what gnomes tell Haggu; Haggu can’t read.

Alright, as indicated by this short guest post, Ogre-Time casts us into the skin of a burly employee of a dungeon keeper. In fact, anyone who has ever played one of the actual Dungeon Keeper video games will find the setup pretty familiar: The dungeon houses a bunch of monsters and a bunch of traps, and as the ogre employee, we have to check everything’s running fine before a squad of greedy, destructive adventurers tries to plunder our home/workplace/home office (not sure here, the book gives very little background).

Ogre-Time has two major strengths. The first is its portrayal of the ogre mind, which works so well I’m wondering about the author’s ancestry (no, just kidding). This even includes a level of meta-humor, where a few sections offer options that you can’t actually take, as they’ve been crossed out – these are without exception very useful and sensible options that, well, just wouldn’t occur to the average ogre. Maybe not even to experienced ones, who knows? Anyway, this “through the eyes of the ogre” aspect is executed very well from beginning to end, and a big part of this book’s fun.

Completely unrelated, but also built rather well, is the adventure’s structure. The first part has you checking a number of traps and “colleagues”; you can interact with them in a number of ways, but won’t have time to go through the entire place. The adventure doesn’t hold your hand here, meaning you are definitely not precluded from doing ogrishly dumb things. In any case, when the adventurers finally arrive, your actions during the inspection phase will play a big part in determining which way these nosy intruders will take and how efficiently they are dealt with. Even though the section restriction allows for only so many dungeon elements to inspect and twist, Ogre-Time mimics the satisfying preparation/execution gameplay flow of the Dungeon Keeper games quite accurately. To quote a completely different franchise – “I love it when a plan comes together.”

What else is there? Well, not much, and that’s why I still didn’t feel quite sated after winning (which is bad for an ogre). The conflict/character system is a derivate of Fighting Fantasy, but that’s okay; I highly doubt any true ogre would subject himself to the ornate duels of Last Song of the Homura, for instance.

However, I really would have liked a bit more plot on my plate. Yes, Ogre-Time knows what it wants to be, and a grand backstory isn’t part of that; but when I had resolved the final confrontation, I couldn’t help but think “that was it?” Ogre-Time only uses 88 of the allowed 100 sections and about 15,000 of the maximum of 25,000 words; there would have been ample space to foreshadow a boss “villain” (in this scenario almost inevitably a boss hero) or maybe tell a little more about the ogre’s employer. Or both to have a full story arc. Now our ogre protagonist would of course not meddle in the affairs of wizards or even be interested in their long-term plans and diabolic rituals and what have you; but right from the first section, Romein shows that Ogre-Time separates between the ogre’s mind and the player’s understanding, and hints of a backstory that would be useless to the ogre, but invite the player to imagine the bigger picture would have been the icing on the cake, and might easily have launched Ogre-Time into my Top 3. As noted above, such elements are not missing because Romein ran out of space, so if he reads this: I would be interested to learn whether the overall restricted dimensions of the adventure were a conscious decision, simply owed to a lack of time or it just didn’t occur to you to place such a roof on the overall construction.

Finally, as far as polishing goes, the formatting is fine, I didn’t notice any grievous errors and Ogre-Time even boasts hyperlinks between the individual sections. There is a lot of space between sections and even paragraphs, which together with the generally thin text (see 60% of the max. word count, above) makes the whole document look a little empty, but that’s a curious observation rather than a complaint. One slight caveat: On my first playthrough, I managed to kill the same hero twice, and drafting up a map with GBAT, I noticed that there is at least one path which does loop around. This is, naturally, the result of the many interdependencies between preparation and execution, so it’s somewhat forgiveable.

Conclusion

• Writing: Very good, just less than I would have liked.
• Plot: Below average – while there are many ways the situation can develop, I wouldn’t count any of this as a storyline.
• System: Solid average, some nice ideas (crits on doubles), nothing groundbreaking.
• Structure: Remarkably flexible, thumbs up!
• Execution: Above average, with the exception of the mentioned loop.
• Overall: This drumstick could have used more meat, but generally, it’s impossible not to have at least some fun with Ogre-Time, and that counts for something. Unless you don’t enjoy being a big, simple brute for a while, but in this age of information overkill, who wouldn’t? Good chances on top half, outsider for top 3.