67 | WHY POUT?
67 | WHY POUT?
by: Andrew Schultz
Progress:
- I completed this game in around 1h50m. I made relatively little use of the walkthrough, solving the majority of the puzzles on my own (the suffering is evident in some sections of this transcript, such as when I was desperately trying to reach “some islands” which turned out not to even be a puzzle phrase). So yeah, it wasn’t a truly clean win, but I feel proud of how I did overall, that was tough!
Things I Appreciated:
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There’s something so brilliant about the puzzle design. You think: all I need to do is say these two words out loud, how hard could it be? It turns out, surprisingly hard. (This game would’ve benefited from me recording the sound in the room I was playing it, where I would just say the random combinations of words out loud in different ways over and over again.) Some of the puzzles just solved themselves instantly the moment I read them, but there are plenty that are quite deceptive. So I honestly commend the level of depth that comes from what is on the surface, a simple puzzle type. I was caught off guard by what a good challenge it was.
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I liked that there were occasional hints that get you on the right track. After a while, you realize that you get a certain message when you have one word correct but not both; and another message if you have a homophone of a correct word. These proved to be pivotal in many situations where I was stuck.
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It was interesting how you start from a place of knowing nothing and gradually piece together a story of what happened through this game of restorative cognition. At first I was so confused by the game’s cover art, like why is there this cartoony drawing of a DND party that has nothing to do with anything? But then a few puzzles later it finally clicked for me what was going on, generally. I like that there was an overarching narrative in the chaos.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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Like any word games, there’s a lot of variance in what people from different backgrounds will find challenging due to cultural/dialect specificity. Since there were some (to me) UK English oddities, I struggled with puzzles that used words I was unfamiliar with. The most vexing instance of this was “naff,” which I read phonetically as rhyming with “laugh,” but based on the solution to that puzzle, seems to actually rhyme with “off” for the solution to make sense. I did actually solve that puzzle, but it was a miserable time to get past that puzzle as it was a major progression gate. The thing is, there really isn’t a solution to this. It would be similarly vexing if the puzzles were written using US English dialect/slang that created similar issues for UK readers, etc. I don’t think there really is a solution to this, except maybe to be careful of gating off major progression behind a puzzle that is more likely than not to be specific to a dialect, and leave that for the less linear puzzles that can be done out of order?
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In general, I thought that the individual word puzzles were great. Where the game created noticeable issues for me was in terms of navigation and times when I had solved puzzles for the future but was unable to advance on what I was supposed to be doing. I think at my worst I was at +4 ahead (this happened because I made a huge error and never went east from the starting area. I went north, west, and south so many times, but for some reason, just missed the east direction entirely). It felt arbitrary that some puzzles were just available to work on in a room, but became unusable because the game needed me to solve a puzzle in a completely unrelated location. I think I especially struggled with the navigation/inter-location dynamic because of the surreal way that everything is written, so I struggled to distinguish between rooms that had more puzzles to solve, and rooms where I couldn’t advance at all but couldn’t realize that.
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In a bizarre moment, the game produced a self-aware bug message. I will relay that to you now: “Oops, I somehow forgot to reset think-cue entry for grow vial. This is a trivial bug–but please let me know!” This is me letting you know. This isn’t a bad thing, I just found it really funny to imagine that the author had spent time programming the game to produce context specific bug messages like this, it really caught me off guard.
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This is a minor thing, but I found the dead mall to be a somewhat immersion-breaking location. Weirdly, this is not even the first game that I played for these IF Comp responses that has a dead mall randomly in a fantasy setting, but it felt odd here given how much of the area seemed like more of a typical fantasy setting (if portrayed in a surreal and disorienting way due to the game’s premise). Maybe it means another sense of “mall”? But considering you encounter objects like fliers, it was definitely a shopping mall in my mind’s eye.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This game shows both the benefits and challenges of basing a parser again around word puzzles. The thing I asked myself while playing is, was a parser game a good delivery mechanism for these word puzzles? Yes, and no. Yes in the sense that, it would be far less satisfying to solve a completely linear or decontextualized list of word puzzles. Having them built together into a narrative made them more fun and engaging to solve, and the nonlinear aspect allows you to put puzzles on pause to work on others. At the same, I encountered friction when I had to remind myself to do parser-game style commands (like checking my inventory to look at something I hadn’t realized I had received as an item), or trying to make connections between distant locations. Overall, though, I feel like this was a successful entry in showing the kind of language games one can perform using this type of game engine.
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Weird things can happen when feedback isn’t enough to discourage a player from a puzzle. I spent a ridiculous amount of time on “some islands” thinking it was a puzzle, despite none of my guesses even triggering one of the “you’re kind of close” hints. And I just kept trying, because other things had seemed like I had exhausted every possible option only for the correct answer to suddenly materialize in my mind, so I thought something similar would happen with this one. It makes me think there’s a certain challenge in communicating the information: there is more to do here but you cannot advance this puzzle until you advance a puzzle somewhere else. I really just needed to be directly told that, but I couldn’t pick up the hint.
Quote:
- “The crude orc doesn’t have any strategy, per se.”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- I think it was when I finally had the breakthrough to guess “nah phase” which was probably the hardest individual puzzle for me in the game. I couldn’t believe that I solved that without the walkthrough.
DemonApologist_WhyPout.txt (144.2 KB)
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