I have a very spoilerific question about “The Little Match Girl at the Battle of Gray Peaks.”
I posted a two-star review of this game on IFDB.
This game is boring on purpose
You do, in fact, have to solve the logic puzzle to win this game, and it is very boring work. In fact, when you win, the game explicitly acknowledges how boring it is, as part of a bonus puzzle.
Specifically, at the end of the game, the game presents the player with a “tiny riddle.”
One tiny riddle remains; it is of no interest to most, but perhaps it will entertain you. The riddle is this: What truth of warfare did Scrooge the Mammalgirl reveal at the Battle of the Gray Peaks?
It is a single word, of seven letters.
There are a bunch of hints, and the answer is…
> scrooge
No, that’s not it. It is all my fault—I am being too coy.Recall that, in order to teach teach this lesson, Scrooge had to assign each of Helkithin’s units to a very specific opponent.
I should let you try another guess before I explain it too directly.
> hint
I’m sorry, that’s not it either. Let me show you the critical information. To arrange this particular outcome for the battle,Narth was matched against Kheti;
Presh was matched against Eleta;
Edeks was matched against Udoch;
Helkithin was matched against Whicestik;
Scrooge was matched against Ninoksh;
Rithus was matched against Akheut;
and Xhess was matched against Ethys.Try another guess.
> warring
The key to this is an old puzzle-technique, which will serve you well if you are ever called upon to match the wits of nerds or dorks. It is a sort of puzzle in which one compares two words of the same length and notices that in one particular position—the second letter of each word, for example—the two words share the same letter—the D shared by EDEKS and UDOCH, for example.Try another guess.
> tedious
That’s exactly right!Although perhaps it is unwise of me to invite the comparison.
It was, indeed, quite tedious to manually match up all of the units against all of the other units using the combat simulator. Building out that 8x8 table is a lot of straightforward hard work. When I was nearly halfway through, I remember thinking, “gosh, I hope there’s a really cool payoff for this!”
When I read that the riddle solution was “tedious,” and that “tedious” is/was the “truth of warfare,” I thought you were saying that the point of the game is that warfare is tedious, and that you’d intentionally built a game with a tedious central puzzle to make that point. I thought it was a practical joke, at the player’s expense.
(Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!)
I quite nearly titled my review “This game is tedious on purpose,” but I was afraid it would be too big of a spoiler.
On IFDB, you replied,
I don’t think the title of this review is accurate. I didn’t intend for this game to be boring. I wanted it to be fun, and my testers said they had fun; if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have released the game in the state I did.
Based on your impressions in this thread, I think you may have had an anomalous experience with the game. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it more.
So, my question is, what were you saying? I thought you were saying that the central puzzle of the game was tedious. If I got that wrong, then, what did you mean when you wrote that the “truth of warfare” is “tedious”?