A Very Strong Gland by Arthur DiBianca

Competitions IFComp
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I’m near the two hour mark: not all the way through but on the progress indicator I can see I have only the finder and the propeller left, so I suspect I’m most of the way through.

Another solid puzzler, but… I don’t know. I feel like this line of experimentation is getting pretty well played out, at least for me. It doesn’t have the mechanical depth of The Wand, nor the amount of entertaining character of Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg or something like Plasmorphosis or Chuk and the Arena.

So if I’m not keeping going for the next cool puzzle insight, and I’m not keeping going for the next amusing character moment… I sorta forced myself through this one.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the design, especially the intro section, is “waiting for spooky action-at-a-distance: the game.” If I counted right, the first ELEVEN turns of the game are waiting. And then there’s a further five or six or ten that are either waiting or doing the one command that the game ordered you to do. And a bunch of the later puzzles are also like, well, you just didn’t wait long enough. Or well, you finished this thing, now go scour the (to be fair, very small) map to see what changed. And maybe you can see that by looking and maybe you have to touch everything, too.

I don’t know. It’s fine. It’s solid, it’s polished; there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you played The Vambrace of Destiny, there’s nothing new here either. It’s more of the same. Which I’m sure some people will be very happy about even if it’s leaving me disappointingly flat at the moment.

Also, I may be temporarily stuck right now: I didn’t try extremely hard since I was approaching the time limit but none of the blue or red or amber auras (or the robot?) seem to do anything with the pieces of the finder. So I’m guessing I have to do something somewhere else? But I’m not sure where there either: I thought I had tried everything on everything already. So if anyone wants to give me a nudge… it might be nice to see the ending but I’m not sure if I care enough to keep playing blind.

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I tested this but it was a while ago so I can’t easily remember what happened and when. What shapes are the objects that are the pieces of the finder, and what room are they in?

This is the problem with having a reputation for constant innovation, I guess. You can’t just rest on your laurels without people being disappointed that there’s nothing new.

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finder room description

It’s the Complicated Room: it has a smooth white pillar from floor to ceiling: floating around it are a wheel, a scallop, a bulb, and a triangle.

  • Each turn one of them will shiver and change color: it initially seems random which item and which color (blue, black, yellow, and green).

  • Touching them with red/blue/amber auras doesn’t seem to do anything (although if there is some pattern and they only respond in certain states I could have randomly missed hitting the right state, certainly).

  • I tried both things with the pusher, since the power dips/surges affected other things earlier on, but didn’t see any change.

  • None of the three aliens seem to have anything to say: Zona isn’t ready for juice yet, Jopho wants you to fix the finder, and Klanku is cleaning and thinks it’s funny that we sleep at night.

  • The robot can’t stack or patch them.

  • What haven’t I interacted with? There are the panels in the Damaged Room: they had an amber aura when they first appeared. I assumed they were there to be the thing making the debris hard to handle, but maybe they have another purpose too? There are several messages in the relaxing room that I don’t think Klanku (or anyone) has seen yet, and one of them is “some important advice” but I’m not sure how to move him around. That might be it? Although I didn’t fix the crack in the Damaged Room until right near the end, so there could be other things I’m missing too. Obviously there’s something.

Hmm, good point. “nothing new here” doesn’t express my problem with it. It’s honing in on all the parts from previous games that I don’t like and isn’t doing any of the things that I do.

  • Carrying minimalism to an extreme: you basically have two actions: TOUCH and WAIT, so WAIT has to carry its fair share of the problem solving and… it was a cute gimmick the first two times in Vambrace of Destiny but I don’t find it to be a very interesting verb once the novelty wears off. And it really drives this home by putting the first twenty-ish turns of the game on rails and giving you almost nothing to do but wait, so it doesn’t get off to a fast start. Though I do appreciate that you can lose the game by ignoring their first test and making them think you’re too unintelligent to bother with.
  • These are always a paper-thin story over a box of puzzles, but I’ve always preferred the ones that give a little more illusion that there’s a world here, a fiction: Inside the Facility, The Wand, The Temple of Shorgil. Plus “aliens kidnapped you to experiment on and then crashed their spaceship so it’s up to you, plucky earthling, to save them from their own incompetence!” isn’t really my kind of story: I don’t want to help them out! I don’t even like them! Why can’t they clean up their own mess?!

So yeah, expectations, as you say. There was that super fun four years starting in 2016 where the things DiBianca wanted to write were a major bright spot in the comp for me but then our tastes have been diverging ever since. But maaan, those years were so fun…

OK, I’ll stop whining now. This is very much the direction he’s been moving in: it’s solidly put together, a fluffy story thrown over a set of minimalist two-verb puzzles; you likely won’t get stuck too much if you remember that WAIT is one of your two verbs, and the map is nine rooms so it’s a nice comfy size to keep in your head. If you liked Vambrace of Destiny but it got too big and complicated, this is probably a great game for you.

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Aha!

Gentle hint:

When you touch the pillar, it says that the piko are not unified. How could you unify them?

Bigger hint:

You can pause the color changes for a turn.

Answer;

Make them all the same color by learning the order of color change, then pausing them at the right time to synchronize the colors.

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I’m stuck on the very final puzzle. My guess is that I have to trap Ungru in the testing room. I’ve tried timing when he’s in the feeder room and turning it into a testing room at that moment, since Zona saying he’d help might mean he’d push the topaz. All I can do right now is the white, blue, red, and amber jackets, changing the display, messing with the sculpture, turning on the juice, turning windows on and off, and opening and closing the door.

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Trapping him is indeed the answer. I see from my transcript that I had a little problem with the timing of this, but keep trying. Map his movements-- I think his movements are always one ahead of the current turn. Like, if you were in the room with him, he goes to the next room and is technically in there. Try again.

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Thanks! That worked perfectly.

I’m linking my review here, and plan on doing that with other games that have individual review threads:

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cross-posting my separate review here

I came to this thread during my play and had a bit this experience because everyone’s hints were from further into the game:

Image of the "crazy sickos on Reddit" meme format, which is a screenshot of a Clickhole article with the headline "Holy Shit, You're Fucked: It Seems Like Not Even The Crazy Sickos on Reddit Have Ever Posted About The Problem You Just Looked Up" over a stock-photo style image of a man staring seriously at a laptop.
Image of the "crazy sickos on Reddit" meme format, which is a screenshot of a Clickhole article with the headline "Holy Shit, You're Fucked: It Seems Like Not Even The Crazy Sickos on Reddit Have Ever Posted About The Problem You Just Looked Up" over a stock-photo style image of a man staring seriously at a laptop.774×751 53.8 KB

So in case anyone else comes looking I’ll note that in the cut at the bottom of my review I wrote up progressive hints for the puzzle when you first get access to the Bumpy Room and the puzzle in the White Room. Those both felt like they were in the first half of the game.

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A hint file is now available.

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Well, better late than never. I want to thank all those people who posted transcripts. I couldn’t have done it without their help.
P. S. I liked this game.

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Did anyone ever email requesting hints? Or was the inbox still empty until the end?

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Yes. The final number of requests was greater than zero and less than two.

“Email for hints” was just an experiment, since I wasn’t aware of anyone trying that before. I was curious what would happen – I really had no idea what to expect.

I was aware it might negatively affect the voting. I hoped it might shed some light on whether there were particular puzzles that stumped people consistently.

Unfortunately, little data was acquired. But I think I can now say with some confidence that people do not want to email authors for hints!

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