7DRL contest 2007.

Save Scummer

The third 7DRL reviewed in this issue of RTM is Save Scummer by Jeff Lait who already released two other 7DRLs in the past – namely Letter Hunt and You Only Live Once – and who is developer of POWDER, a roguelike for the GameBoy Advance. While You Only Live Once has bypassed quick game overs by just letting the player control another character after the first one died, Save Scummer goes completely mad.

In principle, Save Scummer is an interactive bot. First naive attempts to control the @ by the player fail, only two keys work. The right direction key goes forward in time, the left direction key goes back. Every turn the bot continues its journey through the dungeons. The readme of Save Scummer calls this ironically »Intelligent ›Do What I Mean‹ commands that reduce all possible actions to a single keystroke«, a statement which seems to be a sideblow on too simplified user interface concepts.

The game as whole can’t be taken serious and I doubt that the author does it. Instead it’s a well-done parody on the genre and on players who always make copies of their save files. »Good thing you made that backup savefile!« is displayed every time the bot dies (which, in fact, occurs not very often, as the bot seems to be rather intelligent). More irony is given by the welcome message. It refers to roguelikes with large amounts of text; text which is often skipped by impatient players.

Although there is no real game in the game, it makes fun for a while – watching the bot conquering the enemies, clearing dungeon levels and diving deeper and deeper is quite exciting and simply looks cool. Will he survive or will he need to go back in time and try another decision? Because of this, Save Scummer would make a great screen saver, and it also shows how non-textual, non-ASCII-art intro sequences or »cut scenes« in a roguelike could look like (read the article on interface concepts for more details of this problem).

Mario Donick