21 | MISS GOSLING’S LAST CASE
21 | MISS GOSLING’S LAST CASE
by: Daniel M. Stelzer
Progress:
- I timed out after two hours, having scored only 6 out of 18 possible points in 609 turns. I believe that I fully solved one of the game’s puzzles, and may have softlocked the one that I had been working on for many, many, many turns at the point that I timed out.
Things I Appreciated:
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Something I found to be a therapeutic game design element is that since the player avatar is a dog, when I was frustrated by my parsing errors, seeing the dog do something cute and dog-like would help alleviate some of the tension I was feeling as a result of not understanding the puzzle. Like Watson, sweetie, I am SO sorry that I am putting you through my incompetence like this, you deserve better. That put me in a more constructive mood at times when I needed to refocus on the puzzles to make any more progress before the two hours ran out.
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I really enjoyed the puzzle that I solved involving placing certain objects in the dumbwaiter. That was one of the first things I wanted to interact with, and I felt like this was a very challenging puzzle that nonetheless has an elegant solution.
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The game has a very polished UI. The way that things are set apart to interact with, and the option to type a command or press one of the suggested commands, is all very streamlined to me.
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The writing sets a very consistent atmosphere appropriate to the “cozy mystery” genre. While it’s not a genre that I like that much, I absolutely bought into what the game was doing and I had fun despite not liking the genre.
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I thought the game had great worldbuilding. I believed while playing that Miss Gosling could be an ongoing series that this was (I guess) the final entry in. I’m not sure if that’s true. If it’s not true, the way that the game mentions snippets of past mysteries that she solved gives the impression that you are picking up a book late in a mystery series and reading it, with an entire context of the rest of Miss Gosling’s life out there to influence her thinking in this puzzle.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Softlock (?). For some context (to make it easier to make sense of the transcript), one of the first things I did upon gaining access to most of the house was start a fire so I could eat Constable Davis’s sandwich and one of her biscuits (this was before I knew what my goal with this puzzle was, I was still testing the game’s mechanics and how the character would respond to Watson’s actions as he maliciously ruined her day). Unable to make progress after I had solved the carrot puzzle, I looked at the walkthrough for instructions as to how to progress into the gardens. Because the walkthrough takes the form of hints, rather than an explicit list of moves to carry out, I spent the rest of my time in a loop trying to figure out how to “Take her sandwich and run to the Reception Room.” No matter what I did, I could not get her to move from the kitchen into the reception room. I tried running there with the biscuit, and she did not follow me. I tried showing her the biscuit while in the kitchen, but she just takes the biscuit and throws it away. I tried barking at her while in the kitchen, but you can’t bark while holding the biscuit. You also can’t put the biscuit down to bark either, Watson refuses to do that. I tried other ways of getting her attention while holding the biscuit in the kitchen, but she ignores you. I tried barking at her like 8 times in a row to see if I could be annoying enough to force her to pay attention (no, apparently she’d rather just turn off the stove every two minutes without ever wondering why this malevolent dog is constantly trying to burn the house down). I tried waiting with the biscuit in the reception room, but the biscuit in Watson’s mouth dematerialized (the game doesn’t explicitly say this, I assume in-universe Watson just eats it without being prompted). What I think is happening mechanically, is that the game cannot allow two interactable biscuits to exist simultaneously, so the moment that Watson re-enters the dining room having turned off the stove, the existing biscuit is dematerialized and replaced with the newly materializing biscuit that is in the tin. Even with the walkthrough, and after searching through other reviews, I could not progress this puzzle. For me, this biscuit puzzle is the Dark Souls of IF Comp. At one point, I considered whether I should fully restart the game to see if I could solve the game with the long-since-digested sandwich instead of the biscuits, but since the walkthrough explicitly says “Or, if the sandwich has been destroyed, she’ll be eating a biscuit. Same idea,” implying that the biscuits will work if the sandwich is gone, I thought, no, I’m the one who’s wrong, the biscuit should work if I just guess the right set of commands. So I still don’t know what the heck happened here. Was it an actual softlock, or is there some perfect sequence of events that will allow a player to get Constable Davis to care enough about the biscuit to follow Watson into the reception room that I somehow just never quite guessed in all those turns trying?
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This might be an odd recommendation, but since we learn that “you’ve never been any better than Watson at distinguishing reds from yellows from greens,” the UI should be colored accordingly, to improve immersion. The fact that green, red, and yellow are all used to color different elements that can pop up takes me out of the illusion that this character cannot easily distinguish between green/red (though I guess if the player actually does have red/green colorblindness, this is resolved for those players in particular).
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Since I used the stove to start a fire 13 times in my playthrough, I thought it would be immersive if the environment changed to reflect that. For instance, when spending time in the kitchen, you should be able to see a fine grime of soot/ash, or a lingering smell of char, each time you enter this space, to reflect the actions that have taken place there. There were other times where these kinds of details were present (for instance, showing the carrots to Constable Davis has her take note of Watson dripping water onto the rug, showing that the game remembers that you’ve been wading around in the cellar). Maybe my playthrough was especially aberrant and it isn’t worth programming a detail like this in, but if you expect it’s likely for players to be burning a lot of stuff on the stove trying to solve the puzzle, it would be good to add.
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I got stuck in the introductory puzzle, even with the red hints. (This was ominous foreshadowing for Biscuitgate.) I spent a lot of time trying to knock over the binocular stand as the larger object to turn over the chair with. The language “The rubber ball proves too small to foul the wheels” made me think that I needed to take the police tape to “foul” the wheels that way, but the tape was untakable. This was especially confusing when I was prompted “Watson looks at the shredded police tape in confusion. Did you want him to take it?” I was like, yes, I do want to take it! But I kept getting the action description for “biting tape” when I was trying to “take tape.” Eventually I had to use the walkthrough to understand that the books really were the solution to the puzzle, and that was enough information to get me through this bottleneck. I don’t find using books to mess up wheels to be a very intuitive solution, but I seem to be in the minority with that opinion based on the other reviews that I glanced at. So, take what you will from my experience.
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The other puzzle I was stuck on involved getting into the attic. The only thing I found that I thought might be involved was a mattress. Without commenting on the solution to that puzzle, since I don’t even know what it is having timed out before attempting more with it, I found that it strained belief that I could, as a dog, push an entire mattress from room to room, and neatly lean it back against the wall. I get that the game requires some suspension of disbelief, but perhaps some detail could be added to the description to describe how difficult it was to move, or that the mattress was lighter than expected.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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My experience playing this game is a (hopefully) fascinating case study into the creative decision to include a hint system instead of a true walkthrough. Had there been neither a hint system nor a walkthrough, I expect I would’ve been less frustrated, knowing that I had to get it together and find a solution myself. Had there been a true walkthrough, I could have had resolution on whether or not I was softlocked by entering an exact sequence of commands and seeing if it behaved as expected. But the fact that a hint system existed, and I had fully read the steps I needed, and things I expected to work according to the hint did not, it was especially embarrassing to not be able to proceed. In that case, I would’ve appreciated a more direct walkthrough even though that is less elegant. Comparatively, there was a perfectly balanced hint for the carrot puzzle that gave me an “aha” moment (“Smelling got you in; another sense will get you out.”) So the lesson I take from this is: if the goal of hints is to make a challenging game more approachable without just giving an exact solution, you run the risk of players still struggling if the exact sequence of commands required is especially precise.
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I think the use of an animal as the actor in a parsing game is an inspired game design choice. When a player makes errors as a human in a parsing game, it can break immersion in the sense that an actual human would just be able to do some version of that thing that you tried. But by relocating the locus of action to an animal who is trying his best but won’t always understand, it very cleverly eases that aspect of parsing instruction that even a well-intentioned dog is not necessarily going to do exactly what you think he is going to do. So the lesson is: to think creatively about how the actor in a parsing game can be used to soften the edges off of parsing errors. It’s very beautifully done here.
Quote:
- “Really, you suppose, that’s the best you can expect from a dog’s cooking.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When, after already solving the dumbwaiter puzzle to put the flashlight in to light the cellar, I had to use a variation of that same action to bring the bundle of carrots out of the depths of the root cellar. It was a legitimately clever puzzle in how it first trains the player to use the dumbwaiter, misdirects with the pump (can you restore electricity to de-flood the basement, thereby allowing the light to turn on and the door to stay open?), and forces the player to realize that they must re-use the object they already used.
DemonApologist_MissGosling.txt (207.0 KB)