The Dryad’s Riddle
It started as an ordinary, carefree day. You were with your best friend and your sister, playing hide-and-seek and racing down the hill. The discovery of a ring of mushrooms at the foot of a tree prompted a discussion about fairy lore, but you certainly never expected to follow a mysterious voice through a portal into the land of dreams. When you accidentally destroy the portal, it falls to you to collect six special mushrooms to rebuild the circle - and in a realm where wit and wisdom are more precious than any currency, it’s going to take all your cleverness to earn your way home.
Avery Moore’s sprightly little fantasy The Dryad’s Riddle isn’t your typical ChoiceScript game. Aside from choosing your character’s name and gender in the beginning, the interactivity is limited to solving riddles posed by the characters you meet in the land of dreams. There’s a map with six locations (including a carnival, a haunted house, and an art museum), which can be visited in any order. In each location, a cast of colorful characters will run you through a gantlet of varied puzzles.
The challenges range from simple riddles to logic problems best worked out with paper and pencil. Most readers who enjoy puzzles of this kind will have seen some of them before, but quite a few were new to me. There’s a hint system if things ever get too tricky; I had to use it only a couple times, but in my experience the hints were genuinely helpful without giving too much away. There’s also an option to eat magic beans which give you the answers outright - but be careful, the ending you ultimately get depends on how many hints you use.
As much fun as I had with the puzzles, there’s just as much delight to be had in the frame story, which is itself full of wit, wordplay, and unexpected twists of thought. Fans of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series will feel right at home with Moore’s splendidly twisted logic. Amidst the absurdity of a dream-land carnival, for instance, the PC is surprised to stumble upon a petting zoo full of perfectly ordinary animals - but the hobgoblins and pixies native to the realm stare in wonder at such beasts as one-headed dogs and hornless unicorns. The playful surprises and subversions that pepper the story help set the reader into the perfect frame of mind for solving puzzles that require thinking outside the box.
Replay value is low - once you’ve solved all the puzzles, there’s not much new to offer - although I can see myself replaying this every few years or so just to enjoy the story. Readers who go in expecting a traditional interactive novel are likely to be disappointed. But if you enjoy puzzle games - or wordplay and quirky worldbuilding - The Dryad’s Riddle is well worth picking up.