5.5.- The evil meat hand
Let’s make a jump to this puzzle although it is the last one in the game, and I will return later to the other ones. I was sure that this would be a difficult puzzle (after all it is the last one of the game), but I also believed that people perhaps would stop at that point to think, checking all the available “items” in the game (scarce amount of them) and finally would ask Death for help.
As Iñigo Montoya says in the Princess Bride film, when searching for an intelligent man to help him in his mission: “I don’t need Visini! I need the man that defeated Visini!”
Those were the kind of thoughts that I believe were probably a good starting point to solve that final puzzle without further help. I talk more about how difficult the puzzles are and how many people were able to solve them later.
One of the reasons to maintain the environment as simple as possible was the graphical minimalism I decided for the game, but there were also technical reasons to minimize the number of elements in them:
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To avoid creating too many commands due to time limitations (examine, …)
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To avoid many interactions with many objects , to avoid having to create commands for them, and to avoid nonsense complexity for the player (use A with B in N possible ways)
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To avoid drawing them in many different situations, because the player having many possible actions could cause technical difficulties.
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To simplify the available options to the player, as the puzzles seem to be hard enough.
This location is graphically more complex than the others: it has many more lines, has perspective, and has a lot of objects in it (it’s a tribute to a classical non-parser videogame, do you know which one?). The reason is that no matter what you type, you are going to be punched by the Evil Meat Hand, so the objects and the scenery are a kind of a big red herring.
As I said before, the only way to defeat the Evil Meat Hand is to call death, in the different ways the game allows from this location.
Adding the slight modification to the image sequence in the “death” location, as I already told, would probably increase the probability of people finishing the game without further help when they reach this “Evil Meat Hand fight location”.
At this point I must say that as far as I know, nobody passes this screen without using the help system. Some people reached this point without it, as I will explain later, but nobody solved this without help.
However, I have seen a person physically playing this game in front of me. I could see the frustration in her face, trying to do all kinds of funny, clever, and desperate actions. The deal was for me to remain silent without giving additional clues, but at one point it was really hard for me, when she started to talk alone about possible ways of actions without typing them, thinking aloud, and one of them was “don’t know… call death to kill the hand…or jump over it… or…” and never tried the “call death command. All the frustration at that point moved to me X.X
So, with this in mind I think that although difficult, this puzzle can be solved.