Counterfeit Monkey

It should be saying WHAT the secretary looks at that tips her off before you’re captured. If it’s something illegal that you’re carrying, sometimes you can conceal it by putting it into your backpack and closing the backpack. If it’s the pass or the wig themselves, you may need to have disguised them with origin paste to mask their true nature.

I found that that part could be fairly niggly:

Make sure your backpack is actually closed. A lot of the things you do wind up implicitly opening the backpack.

Hi All,

So I’m stuck in this game at around 40 points. My only listed goal is to use the homonym paddles with the legend but I can’t get back to the location I saw them last, because its owner is napping. Am I locked out of winning by chance or is their something I’ve overlooked? I have no obviously helpful inventory items I can turn into keys, or anything like that.
Thanks for any advice!

The homonym paddle is in the Fleur d’Or Drinks Club, isn’t it?

Aha. I tried “go to paddle,” and the game interpreted that as a reference to the book in the bookshop, which naturally was closed. So I found the paddle and got through that section okay.

Except now, I’m stuck in the university. Professor Waterstone won’t talk to me. I’ve successfully returned my library book, gotten access to the synthesizer with the jigsaw, and looted every obviously available item from the rest of the building I’d appreciate any general advice on how I ought to proceed next. My goals are listed as getting the invitation, finding my way into the bureau, and rescuing Brock.
THanks!

There are other useful tools in this area that you want to have access to. Focus on that. Waterstone comes a little later.

Check the InvisiClues, this is the one section that they actually work for. :smiley:

Finished. This game is fantastic – best IF I’ve played in years. Well, okay, it’s the only IF I’ve played in years, so it’s the best ever, maybe.

I needed a few hints (gotten from this thread). Only one puzzle really seemed unfair to me, which was (deep in the Bureau):

[spoiler]When meeting Atlántida…

I had the correct solution pretty quickly, but didn’t figure it out until she had already sounded the alarm. So, when I typed it in, she made a comment about useless allies, and then I was immediately arrested. This gave me the incorrect impression that my answer was wrong, and led me down the false path of searching for a more useful ally. I spent a long time on that before coming here for a hint, only to learn I had the right answer in the first minutes.[/spoiler]

I really liked the game though – amazingly creative, fun, and different from anything I’ve played before.

By the way, I can’t seem to reset the Tutorial mode. I don’t need it, but if someone else in my household wants to play, it might be helpful. I first started the game with Release 1 (inadvertently downloaded from IFDB, because it is listed first). Halfway through, I switched to Release 4 and started over, but the tutorial did not reset. And now, restarting still does not have the tutorial. Was it removed from this release?

The game creates a data file (“monkeyac”) which stores your achievements. This includes the achievement for completing the tutorial, and I guess it skips the tutorial when this flag is set.

The location (and suffix) of this file depends on the interpreter. It might be in the same directory as the game file.

Can I get an explicit solution for Waterstone on Hard Mode? I suppose I’m getting what I asked for, and usually I’m stubborn about toughing it out, but even after reading Emily’s hints I’m staring at my item list and drawing a complete blank.

I think I know one of the solutions to this.

I assume you already have a MEMBER from the diorama? (You can use an S-remover as a weak depluralizer.)

Think about the second hint Emily gave: the synthesizer sometimes places one word inside the other (e.g. SHRIMP TAIL + COCK = SHRIMP COCKTAIL).

Try watching the Monty Python cheese shop sketch. Focus on the names of the types of cheese. One of them might inspire you.

(If Emily thinks this is too much of a spoiler I’ll remove it.)

That did it; thanks.

I was looking at lists of cheeses but didn’t think “member” would be the word stuck in the middle, so of course I started with M… should have just done a Ctrl-F for “member” on a giant list. Oh well.

I’ll look through the source afterward for the other solutions and see if I should kick myself or not.

I don’t actually know what Emily meant with the stack of bowl-like containers, and I haven’t seen it in the source. Right now I’m grepping various regular expressions against /usr/dict/words.

EDIT: Ooh, “plume-embroidery”. I wonder where one would find a plueroidy.

EDIT2: And now "mid-December. This is surprisingly fun.

EDIT3: Found it. I don’t know how anyone would get this except brute-force. [spoiler]You need to use the ASS instead of the MEMBER, and synthesize it with another three-letter noun to get a word meaning “an area of land from which forest has been cleared for the purposes of agriculture”.

I’m not actually sure how that fits in the synthesizer, but it’s the only synthesizable noun I could find for ASS.[/spoiler]

EDIT4: I found another six-letter one, but it requires a noun I don’t think exists in Counterfeit Monkey. Is it possible to find an ENT to make ASSENT?

For the last one, I assume not, because:

B-removing the BENT TWIG doesn’t create an ENT TWIG (which would have made a fine piñata bat, in my opinion). Maybe Tolkien doesn’t exist in this universe, or the remover doesn’t know Tolkien. Or it’s just an oversight. You can make an embodiment of RA just fine, so it’s not because an Ent is fictional.

[spoiler]Checking the source, there is indeed no ENT.

Higgate mentions that she speaks Quenya, so Tolkien does exist in this world. But removers work on a principle of local cultural concepts - so if nobody reads Tolkien in Atlantis, ents may not be a thing you can make. And given how inextricable conlangs are from Tolkien’s world, it’s almost certain that his books are banned in Atlantis.

I feel I’ve done my part towards maintaining the nerdiness of the forum. Carry on, all.[/spoiler]

It should also be possible to do

ASS + BIN (from the Bureau) = BASINS

Ah, that’s the one you were referring to! I wondered if there was a meaning of ASSART I was missing, because the game knows the word and I have the components, but it certainly isn’t a stack of bowls.

On a related note, this game has given me a lot of word puzzles for my book club. The hard-mode cryptolock stumped all of them for almost an hour before someone figured out where the puzzle came from.

Alright, finished it. Nothing else was too bad after that roadblock. This was a great game and one of the few that makes me wish for a sequel, if only to see what additional tools, word mutations, and puzzle ideas could be implemented (it’s easy to wish for things when you don’t have to code them).

Aside from the puzzles, one of the most entertaining things to me was seeing how many animates you can make at once. It wouldn’t fit with the theme of the others, but I was hoping there would be an achievement for having enough of them following you around town. You can create quite the menagerie.

Wait, is the source code to Counterfeit Monkey available? Where?

Here.