I don’t think there’s much point in hiding my identity this time, so I’ll just out and say it: there’s another metapuzzle hidden in this year’s games, with a prize for anyone who solves it before the end of the judging period.
Have fun!
The metapuzzle seems to be extremely well concealed this time. There wasn’t any obvious piece of it in Draconis’s three games, although there might be a secret encyclopedia entry in Forensic Necromancy. I had a theory that it would be possible to summon one of the Assyrians from Forensic Necromancy in Necromanceers, but it was unfortunately unsuccessful.
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A conversation on Discord led some of us to wonder if the password from The Rat is part of it?
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This appears in Forensic Necromancy and has no in-game utility; I wonder if it has anything to do with the meta-puzzle…
> broken tablet
About the size of your thumbnail, with a few cuneiform signs visible on the top face. Namzaqu: something about a “key”?
Also linking this here as possibly relevant (regarding Ryan Veeder’s Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Orient Express):
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Thank you for pointing these out! I hadn’t taken any particular notice of the password or the tablet, but they do seem important.
The Akkadian word for “key” really is “Namzāqu,” which could also be written using Sumerian logograms as GIŠ.E11 or NÍG.GAG.TI. (Akkadian was the language spoken in Nineveh at the time the historical parts of Forensic Necromancy are set.) Per the dictionary in Galilee Bones, the Nabataean word for “key” is “fkaw.” As far as I can tell, the language in that game is a constructed language and not related to the Nabataean Aramaic or Nabataean Arabic spoken by the actual inhabitants of Transjordan in the first century C. E.
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Since it’s been a few weeks, I’ll offer an additional clue: this puzzle extends beyond the bounds of IFComp, but not beyond 2026 as a whole.
Audentes Fortuna juvat!
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Intriguing… I don’t think I have the ability to solve this, but I’d be interested to see if anyone figures it out!
Interesting. I would assume this is pointing towards the Spring Thing '26 games, although there’s also ParserComp, TALJ, IntroComp, the various Neo-Interactive Jams, or possibly even Iron ChIF to look at (although that would require a truly heroic commitment to the bit!).
Some games from the above that have authors who also submitted to IFComp '26 (that I know of):
- The Antediluvian Weapon by Draconis
- The Gnomish Treasury and Fantasy Opera: The Theater of Memory by Lamp Post Projects
- Big Deal, Oh! by Andrew Schultz
- Enigmart by Sarah Wilson
This isn’t an exhaustive list (I’m tied up with other things at the moment and can’t afford to dig further), plus it’s entirely possible that the game(s) in question were released outside of a competition! But I think these might be good places for someone to start looking.
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More Latin, huh? I wonder if Uninteractive Fiction 3 is connected… Though it seems like that’s been pretty thoroughly datamined already.
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