5.7.- The door
This puzzle is different from the rest of the game for many reasons that I’m going to explain.
This is the only place where I use text to communicate with the player instead of graphics.
Other places in the game use words as onomatopoeias (clap, splash, …), initials (R.I.P.), a single word such as “censored”, or the final “The End”. I think that all these make the game more understandable without moving away from the “only graphics” cartoon concept.
The main door sign however is a plain English long message that you need to read and understand if you want to continue the game. It’s the only part of the visible output text that would need a mandatory translation if the game is ported to other languages.
This text in some way “breaks” the way the game world is working, and it also “breaks the 4th wall” asking the player to do things himself instead of Gent Stickman, requesting them to type something in a location of the game where there’s no keyboard, as the keyboard the game is talking about is your physical device. So here, that fourth wall is broken not only in the standard way you can see in a film when the characters look at the spectator and talk directly to them, but in a deeper way.
This situation is also the only one requiring the exact word (in fact two variations are allowed as the sign could be interpreted in two ways) as the password it is. Here I use strict parsing instead of loose one, being this the only point of the game where I do that.
I was trying to achieve two things with this location:
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The tricky one was to have some visible output text somewhere so I could always use it like a life belt if at any moment during the comp I was being told that the game was not a valid one for this reason.
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The deep one was to show that some kinds of “puzzles” or dialogs need to show text to the user, and this is one of them, in fact because it is mainly a text puzzle.
I thought that although this puzzle was violating one of the pillars of the game, “not using output text to be shown to the user”, it was interesting enough to take the risk, and that after all it was going to be in the “adult literate” side of the world.
This kind of puzzle is heated by many people, as I was told by one of the beta testers. If you don’t catch the language trick soon, you can get stuck for a long time trying to solve it. For other people that was an immediate solution, as this kind of puzzles can be seen in other games, and a similar one is in “The Lord Of The Rings”.
In fact, the first “help” image in this location is an image trying to represent this situation of the book/movie, specially thought to give immediate help to people that already know the book or the film:
This led to a funny situation I saw with a person playing that game in front of me, that asked for help and after watching the image for a while said: “So… I need a sword… and a hat…” X D
Many people tried to solve this puzzle using the kind of magical words like, abracadabra, or xyzzy. This last one has the same effect in all the adventure: It teleports you to the beginning, so basically you die, no matter if you use it here or elsewhere.
Another usual word used here was “friend” or “say friend”, perhaps after remembering Lord of the Rings enigma or misunderstanding the help image, the same word used in that book. It did not work, obviously.
The third set of words were words related to the enigma, like “Right”, or “Say Right”, but not exactly the ones required by the enigma that could be “type the right word” or “the right word”.