Disable ALL or decide what should be taken?

I have a simple puzzle where a scenery item needs to be moved, and where it is perfectly reasonable to allow the player to achieve the same result by trying to take the item. If a player types >GET ALL the puzzle is spoiled, so I don’t want this to succeed. My choices, as I see it, are:

  1. Disable ALL altogether.
  2. Exclude the specific item from ALL.

The first seems annoying, the second unfair. Any preferences or other suggestions?

If it’s scenery, then I would assume that it’s not something that the player would normally consider when doing a TAKE ALL kind of action. So excluding it from ALL (until it’s been taken for the first time, or whatever) seems fair enough.

Mmm, I feel that this would anti-hint the puzzle. If I try TAKE ALL and the game lets me take some stuff, I’m going to assume everything else is untakeable. If I then find that a puzzle can be solved by TAKE THAT OTHER THING NOT INCLUDED IN ALL I think I’d be grumpy.

I know that the way you described it PUSH THAT OTHER THING or something would also work, but still, I think you want to avoid misleading hints.

Hrrm, I gotta go with maga on this. If it doesn’t end up in your inventory when you take it, then TAKE (noun) should just be considered another synonym for MOVE (whatever), and thus doesn’t have to be included under TAKE ALL.

Write a specific refusal for the item when taking all: (the curtains) You glance at the curtains, and while you could probably tear them down, that would seem foolish without some reason.