(This was one of our two winners! We will be reaching out to Doctor Spacebar soon to give them their prize)
Review
Workshop in the Ironwood Grove by Doctor Spacebar is a dungeon crawl-focused game with a special emphasis on tactical combat. The story follows the ranger Neris and her academic sister Nell as they investigate a mage’s workshop located in a forest full of fantastic creatures.
The stand-out feature of this game is that both of its lead characters can switch “modes” and change the skills they can access. In Neris’s case, she can use a skill to swap between a bow and a musket, which is I think a workaround to enable you to change equipment in the middle of battle. Nell on the other hand gets something more involved: as the player progresses through the game’s first half, she unlocks four elemental forms that have highly varied stats and skills available. Tacticall changing the characters between modes and managing their MP consumption are at the mechanical core of Ironwood Grove.
Structurally, the game is split into two halves. In the first half, the player explores the forest while finding new forms for Nell. Typically, they’ll find a new form, use its field abilities to solve a switch-hitting or block-pushing puzzle, and then fight a miniboss. This first half is I think meant as a tutorial to introduce the player to the game’s rather intricate battle mechanics, but ironically ends up being a lot more intense than the back half of the game. The key difference is that there is no equivalent to an inn in the first half. Instead, the players must make careful use of Nell’s free self-targeting MP restoration ability, ration the items they find, and make good choices in combat to minimize HP and MP loss. This small decision really changed how I played the game, as I found myself trying to fight each battle as efficiently as possible, occasionally retreating to an earlier area where spending turns to restore MP didn’t result in as much damage taken from enemies. Personally, I really enjoyed this part of the game as it’s not the kind of play you tend to get from modern mainstream RPGs. However, I think it sets some expectations that the second half diverges from wildly.
In the second half, which takes place within the workshop, the players explore smaller elementally-themed areas as they attempt to identify a traitor in the workshop’s staff. This portion of the game offers free, unlimited healing and some equipment upgrades. While the encounters get much tougher here, this portion of the game felt really short in practice. That’s because with the free healing available, I made decisions (including huge mistakes) swiftly and confidently as I was much more willing to spend MP for all party members. The encounters in these areas had so much going on that it seems clear to me these are meant to test the skills the player developed in the game’s first half. Instead, it felt more like a victory lap where I was plowing through encounters at a fast pace. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se, as catharsis of this kind feels good when playing a mechanically challenging RPG. However, I did get the sense that this may not have been what Doctor Spacebar was going for in their design.
A thing I don’t want to forget to mention about the second half is that it has a few moments where the dungeons offer interesting choices. The two that stood out to me were the choice to bribe one of the trolls (which is then subverted in a fun way later) and the choice between a block-pushing puzzle and a boss fight in the final room before the last boss. While I was very tired of pushing blocks by the end of this game, I appreciated that Doctor Spacebar experimented a bit in what kind of interaction can be had in the dungeons. I would say follow this instinct! While this game’s battles are interesting, even some simple variety like picking between two paths or talking to an enemy rather than fighting them helps the game feel more like an adventure and less like a series of purely mechanical challenges.
A recurring thought I had while playing Ironwood Grove was that this feels like a full-length game’s worth of battle mechanics and encounter design compressed into a very tight space. I can see why the author would err on the side of experimenting with more rather than less for a jam game, and I think the groundwork laid here will probably be immensely helpful to them in future projects. In Ironwood Grove itself, however, it at times makes it difficult to meet the game halfway and engage with its content on its desired terms. There are places in the game where I can tell I’m meant to learn enemy weaknesses, patterns, or reactions to certain choices, but the chance to do so is simply too narrow a window. In many cases I would look at the included walkthrough (a great choice, by the way) and notice some clever detail worked into an encounter and realize I’d brute forced my way through it entirely by accident. This is an issue I’ll touch on in depth in the special topic section below, but for now I think the best takeaway for the author is that the next thing to experiment with here would be finding the right pace to gradually escalate the complexity of the game. A game with maybe two or three forms to switch between and dungeons full of encounters that try to get the most out of those limited mechanics would have been great for this game’s length.
Complexity issues aside, I don’t want to overlook what this game does accomplish with its involved battles. The overall game math was very well tuned — I never found myself needing to grind, even after fleeing from a few battles. The only place where I felt a weird jump in difficulty was the first time I met a marshgoyle. I think this was an intentionally tough encounter, but it was made even harder by some ambiguities in how the game worked (covered below in the Special Topic). Other than that, the troop design in this game is very impressive. The bosses in particular hit that sweet spot where I died once or twice against a couple of them but was raring to jump back in with a new strategy. This is a tough thing to pull off with a short, plugin-less game, and I think Doctor Spacebar should be proud of accomplishing that with Ironwood Grove. The bees, the earth dungeon boss, the final boss and the optional boss were all stand-out fights that felt like they could be approached with multiple strategies. I had a lot of fun with these.
Finally, I’d like to touch on the writing. I will admit that the plot involving the workshop and the backstory with the war between elves and other fantasy creatures was not really what kept me playing. The back half plot involving finding the traitor was cool for its cipher puzzles, but likewise felt perfunctory because I didn’t feel like it related much to how I interacted with the game (some kind of information gathering puzzle to identify the traitor would have added a nice bit of variety). Instead, the most interesting plot threads I saw in the game were Nell thinking through the ethics of her profession as a magical researcher, and the relationships she had with Neris and some of the staff in the workshop. As you spend most of the game taking advantage of the elemental power stored in the forest, it felt right for the ending to involve Nell restoring that power to the grove and continuing in her predecessor’s footsteps in the workshop. That was a simple but satisfying arc that felt right for this game’s length.
Nell’s relationship with Neris grabbed my interest, but felt underwritten considering how much dialogue there is in the game, and I really felt this absence because most of the game is about coordinating their modes to succeed in combat. It felt like their relationship was supposed to be core to the game’s themes and scenario, but maybe that some complexity to that relationship was left on the cutting room floor. Still, I was interested in their relationship, and that counts for a lot.
While I was left a bit unsatisfied with the overall structural writing, there were plenty of touches here and there that showed a lot of care went into subtle elements of the game’s narrative. For example, I liked that Neris started the game a couple of levels above Nell. Her expertise even came through in some of the mechanics: having Neris’s experience as a ranger let you “track” enemies to see what you’d encounter in that area was a brilliant choice. And even later, when the player can access some last-minute tutorials (a bit odd in the back half), it’s Neris explaining the mechanics to someone else. These are all great touches that show that when Doctor Spacebar really cares about a certain world or plot element, they are willing to put in the work to make that felt throughout the game. That feeling of care permeates this game. While things feels smooshed into a tight space at times, it always feels like the issue is a surplus of ideas and creativity rather than a deficit. That’s a good place to be in!
Special Topic: Mechanical Clarity
This is a game that really demands the player to engage with its systems and encounter design, which I appreciated and often had a lot of fun doing. Where I think this game could use some tweaking is in the way it communicates with the player. To Doctor Spacebar’s credit, there is already a lot of work done to make things feel fair to the player. The tracking ability mentioned above lets the player view what monsters will appear in an area so they can prepare their pre-battle setup. The skill descriptions are pretty explicit about what they do. You can even go and read books in the workshop about each monster’s strengths and weaknesses, which was a feature that really impressed me. It is overall very clear to me that there isn’t an intent to “hide the ball” from the player. In this section I want to talk about how the ball can become inadvertently hidden from the player.
One of the biggest consequences of how this game packs a lot of encounter variety and battle abilities into a short length is that the player is a lot less likely to learn things through observation. An easy example of this is the skeleton: I found out through the walkthrough that skeletons have high magic defense, making Nell’s base form come in handy with its MDEF-ignoring skill. The problem is, these skeletons appear so early in the game that it’s difficult for the player to understand that their high magic defense is something special. Further, the player may not even have a chance to notice the high magic defense if Neris kills them too quickly with her weapons, as is what happened in my playthrough. Later, when the player finds undead again, there’s a new problem: Nells now has a multitude of forms each hitting enemies for different damage depending on their elemental resistances, so it’s a bit of a longshot that the player will pinpoint what makes skeletons special. From the player's perspective, the low spell damage could just as easily be from an incorrect form choice as it could be from the choice to use magic at all.
This is a recurring issue in this game: the player has a very limited window where the author can reliably expect them to discover a particular fact about an enemy, and later the “direction of approach” (i.e. what forms the characters are in, what skills the player tries, etc) becomes too variable to expect them to learn this fact on subsequent encounters. The end result is the player not having sufficient information for their choices to really be choices. Instead, they’ll end up throwing darts against the wall until one sticks rather than trying to be on the same page with the game’s internal logic.
So what’s the solution? One way to approach this is to reduce encounter variety. If the player can be expected to see a number of skeletons while they’ve got a limited kit, they have a higher chance of figuring out what’s special about that skeleton’s behavior or stats. Then later in the second half of the game, if the skeleton appears again, they immediately clock what kind of threat it presents rather than stroking their chin as they try to remember what this particular enemy’s gimmick was.
Another approach is to provide this information explicitly. This game does that via the library, but that information comes at a point in the game where the player actually has to be less worried about making bad decisions. Having Nerris give this information out or putting it in a note can solve the problem neatly, though it might feel boring to do it this way from a design perspective.
A third approach is to minimize what sorts of things have to be memorized in the first place. A lot of important facts about enemies in this game are technically “invisible” (i.e. they’re stats, a resistance %, etc) but can be learned by the player through observation of damage numbers or of the enemy’s visual appearance. This is fine, but in a game with this much troop variety, you’re going to want to make as much of this information as obvious as possible even if the player has totally forgotten their previous encounter with a monster. The Ice Fiends having a message that tells the player about their magic barrier outright is a good example of this. I should note that this barrier was a bit confusing too — fire magic would destroy the barrier but deal 0 damage, whereas Neris’s Fire Shot would both destroy it and one shot the Ice Fiend, leaving me unsure as to what I’d done right or wrong.
In general, I think whenever adding an information-based challenge to the game, it’s worth stopping and asking:
1) Has the player had enough opportunity to learn this piece of information?
2) Once the player has that opportunity, is it possible for the player to make incorrect assumptions rather than learn the fact you intended?
3) Is this challenge still fun if the information is given up front? Would the player still have decisions to make?
I do want to reiterate that Ironwood Grove has a lot of smart design decisions that attempt to make information as freely available to the player as possible. However, the information load became so great that about 3/4s into the game I started relying entirely on the walkthrough rather than continue to remember what each enemy’s deal was. While this may sound discouraging, I think finding the sweet spot of how much the player should observe and remember is extremely hard to do as a one person design team; commercial games have entire QA teams to figure this out. Having bits of info fall through the cracks like this is inevitable in a game of this type, so hopefully it’s helpful to hear about those situations for when you refine these ideas for a future project. The steps already taken make it clear to me that these gaps are the result of the time limit rather than a lack of good design judgment.