26 | A VERY STRONG GLAND
26 | A VERY STRONG GLAND
by: Arthur DiBianca
Progress:
- I just barely finished this game within the 2-hour time limit. There was a puzzle early on (unvanishing the vanisher) that I was stuck long enough that I decided to look at other reviews for help. I’m glad that I did, because I don’t think I would’ve made it to the end without that one push in the right direction. (Though I’d definitely recommend to players that aren’t adhering to the 2-hour time limit, it’s well worth taking the extra time to solve the puzzles on your own.)
Things I Appreciate:
-
What stands out the most about this game is how deceptive its difficulty is. You start out thinking, really? All I can do is “examine,” “touch,” or “wait”? With such restricted options, and only nine-ish locations to explore, it seems like it would be a quick task to solve. It’s really not. The vagueness of the game (poor translation from an alien language that leaves you to guess at what the hell anyone is even talking about) forces you to pay attention to every cue the game is giving you and deduce what can be done with it. I think there was only one puzzle that I solved “accidentally” (getting the finder to be able to find again) that felt less satisfying as a result. But pretty much everything else makes perfect sense, especially in hindsight when you think, well how silly of me to not have noticed that! So what I’m appreciating here is the puzzle design: giving an extremely limited toolbox that nonetheless must be used very intentionally by the player to get anything done. This game gave me so many moments that provided that satisfying spark of realization/insight from a well-crafted puzzle.
-
The game world is dynamic. There are several timing-based puzzles, so the game expects you to pay attention to the world that is moving and shifting while you are taking your own turns. It creates the illusion that you are not the only entity with agency in this space, which helps liven up the constricted space you play in.
-
I thought the alien language—that is to say, the way that the aliens talk about the world around them—to be internally consistent. It feels like a plausible cultural gap between the player and the aliens precisely because the language follows a kind of logical grammatical pattern that can be discerned.
-
It was very satisfying to solve the final “capture” puzzle, using several of the previous tools/mechanics together at once to accomplish that goal. It was one of those puzzles where I suddenly had an entire plan develop in my head, and went and did it, and it worked exactly how I expected. Those are the kinds of moments that make a puzzle feel good to solve.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
-
I did not enjoy the single letter command entry, and specifically, the way that commands “snap” the moment 1-2 letters are typed. This results in entering a lot of unintentional commands, because you don’t have the opportunity to edit what you are submitting before enter as “enter” is essentially chosen for you by default the moment it is possible. It was hard for me to fight my natural inclination to type full words, resulting in a lot of messy commands. In a way, this kind of ruins the intended efficiency of the system, because of how it slows down processing (“I need to make sure not to type a wrong letter since I can’t delete it”) and how certain timed events can be disrupted if a false command is entered that advances the time counter. Fortunately, at least it’s pretty trivial to set up a timed event for a second try, so that’s not too much harm done. I could imagine that if you played many games with a single-letter-command system like this, it would eventually feel natural. But for me, in 2 hours, it did not.
-
As mentioned above, there was one puzzle that I felt like I never grasped the system of (the “finder” alignment). I was actively trying to learn what it meant to touch those objects with a particular timing, but I wasn’t able to figure out how it worked because it unexpectedly reached a solved state while I was fiddling with it. I was thankful for it to be over, but felt a bit cheated compared to the other puzzles that I felt like I was more in control of solving.
-
This is very much a puzzle-first game, which is fine, but I felt like I was craving a little more reason to connect to either the protagonist player avatar or the aliens in the ship. Because of how sparse the game is (not to mention the intentionally-distancing language gap), it felt more mechanical to solve rather than feeling like I had emotional investment in the events unfolding.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
-
This is a masterclass in a kind of minimalism: giving the player a severely restricted toolset that nonetheless can be used in a myriad of creative ways. I’m not sure exactly how one can really learn to design puzzles with that mindset, but it’s a jolt of inspiration to think critically about basic tools like a “wait” command and what that can be made to accomplish in the game world. I think one such approach is to ask yourself, when you are considering adding a new element to a puzzle: do I need to add a new piece, or can I think of a way a pre-existing piece can fit differently here?
-
In terms of the structure of how the game leads you to solve its puzzles, one of the tools it uses is echoing language across different elements of the game. For instance: “settled”/“unsettled” link together; if an observation is being made about color, think about what tools you have that are color-based and act accordingly. This is a fine line where you don’t want to make it too obvious, while still clearly putting out a signal for the player to notice.
Quote:
- “I do not need an age-stopper, because I am a self-stopper!” (I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around this one but it sure sounds like it’s funny.)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When I was empowered enough by the game at the end to wait the exact number of turns I needed to make the final capture. It felt like I had learned what the game was trying to teach me.