The Temple of Shorgil

Arthur DiBianca (2018)


Blurb: One day, travel guides will talk about this "masterpiece of the Pirothian architect Kitral" -- but only if you, the first person to visit it in over 1,000 years, can find out what's inside.


When continuing my cherry-picking, I felt that I could enjoy The Temple of Shorgil. Exploring some sort of pyramid could be fun. But the game turned out to be under implemented and untested. The first thing I tried was looking at the temple to see what I was going into, but it's not there in the first room.

This was the first sign that the bare minimum had been implemented for the game. I tried to go down the steps, but the game didn't recognize this either. So I tried to focus on what the game had to offer, maybe I should ignore some of the implementation problems.

The game has plaques scattered throughout the Temple. Each one tells part of a tale, the Legend of Shorgil. It's about a hero and some of the stuff he goes through on an adventure that seems reflected in the temple structure itself. It could be filled with clues, I'm not sure. After reading a few of them, and since they don't make a lot of sense and seem abstract, I started to just skim read it. They didn't seem interesting enough to figure out what was going on.

At the heart of the game the player is taking and putting these figures on different pedestals throughout the temple. This becomes tedious, and it doesn't seem clued at all. If it's in the lore on the plaques, then I just didn't understand the stories the author was trying to convey.

Then I looked at the walkthrough to help me get through it. That's when I figured the game wasn't tested. With puzzles that weren't clued it became a lot of hit and miss to get different doors open in the temple. The game does come with a MAP command that display an ASCII map that probably any interpreter can handle. It also comes with pictures that crashed Gargoyle on MacOSX. But you don't need to look at the picture to complete the game.

I gave up on this one too, around the 5th pedestal. It looked like there was 7 total, but following the walkthrough became a case of programming it in. That's no fun, I want to figure it out on my own, so I want it properly clued. Multiple solutions preferred.

The Temple of Shorgil felt like an untested game that had no clues to help the player, except some cryptic messages the player character can translate. With a walkthrough that's hard to follow, other than programming it in, it's almost impossible to figure this one out on your own.


Score: 4