IF Comp Review: A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood

[healyg]

Hello, all and sundry! For the next couple weeks I'm going to be reviewing a game from this year's IF Comp every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Up next, it's Michael Thomet's A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood.

A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood is a Medieval period piece about a vagabond of obscure gender who meets a mysterious figure and suffers an eerie fate after being told their fortune. At first it seems to be leading up to some kind of morality play, what with all the ethical choices near the beginning, but it quickly leads into something different.


Because on replay, during the fortune telling (hidden in a hyperlink near the bottom), there's a scene where the figure directly addresses you, the player, and asks you why you thought your choices this time around would make things turn out differently. It's a neat little bit that encourages you to replay to see what, if anything, could be done to avoid the vagabond's fate (and it explains why the story is in third-person, which I had been wondering about until then), but unfortunately I think it's pretty clear to the player that there's no way out of this before the game admits, yeah, there's no way out of this. And the final point of the game, as revealed in its new subtitle, felt a bit facile to me; haven't we seen this message a hundred times before? But I think the game manages to rise above these faults.

Conclusion: Despite some flaws, A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood is a solid game and a quiet little creeper.