I don’t know if I clicked something on accident, but I’m playing Miss Gosling’s Last Case and little red boxes are popping up that spoil all of the puzzles.
I’m taking a long time to get around because I’m examining everything, and I’m building ideas, but it keeps explicitly telling me the next step on how to solve the puzzle and it feels a little frustrating that I can’t turn it off.
I’ve tried HELP and ABOUT but nothing shows me how to change that setting. If the hints only last for two puzzles then I’ll just push through it but if they’re throughout the game I’ll probably try saving and reloading to avoid them, so if anyone knows that would be very helpful!
And if I clicked ‘give me hints’ on accident earlier, that’s good to know too, so I could just restart to avoid doing that.
Transcript for context (red comments aren’t marked as such in this transcript as it’s just text, but they’re there):
I think this is just supposed to be a thoroughly-signposted game.
I never saw anything that spoiled the puzzles outright apart from the rosebush puzzle. The game determined that I had solved the puzzle and sort of explained it to me even though I didn’t mentally understand the solution.
Based on the transcript, I see you’re in the beginning. The first puzzles are very easy – in fact, I solved one of them by accident. The later ones get more complex, but sometimes the game gives you outright instructions, even at the very end.
Assuming you can’t turn off the hints/instructions, I recommend pushing through. I really liked the game and I think a good chunk of the puzzles are very good and intuitive.
Yeah, the puzzles seem nice, which is why I don’t want them spoiled while I’m looking around! I like to mess around with things for a long time to get a feel for the game before doing anything. Giving away the answers before I even try feels like it’s taking away the part of parser games I like. But, given the large number of testers, I suspect that most others don’t have the same feelings I do.
I appreciate your help. I do still want to turn them off since there’s already a hint system built into the game; my hope is they all use a css style which I can just change to have display:none.
Thanks for your time!
Edit: the game does seem great, which is why I wanted to preserve the experience. If the game was crappy I wouldn’t care and would want to get over with it quickly!
I should really make TUTORIAL OFF get rid of those as well as the green ones! If it’s any consolation, though, they only appear for the very first section of the game and the very last one—the places where there’s only one thing you can usefully interact with. Once you’ve opened up the main body of the game (where you can go work on any puzzle you want), they’ll disappear until the ending.
All the red hint messages are divs with the class .aalook14, so you can get rid of them at the browser level by adding display:none to that as you suggested.
I had done the CSS trick and started playing and I’ve been having a lot of fun. Thanks for responding so kindly to criticism, for giving players more options, and for making a good game!
Of course! It’s very good feedback, and if you’d like to be listed in the credits for suggesting this, I’ll gladly add your name.
The red boxes were added at the eleventh hour after some testers couldn’t find where to go to progress, and in the intro, there’s only really one puzzle you can work on at a time. But if you want to take your time and explore the map, there’s no need for the game to nag you about it.
EDIT: The new build also fixes a bug where the recycling bin link would disappear from the room description if you moved it off the porch, so if that happens, just remember you can type BIN in the parser for the same result. Oops.