Good to know I’m not the only one who was stumped by that puzzle.
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And now we see the infamous puzzle I was alluding to earlier. For whatever reason, you can’t put the cubes into more than two piles, or look for a difference among cubes that are not in piles—no, JINDAK only tells you which of those two piles is brighter, and nothing else. And also the genuine cube might be less magical than the fakes, for some reason?
To me this is Spellbreaker’s lowest moment. It could have at least tried to justify the puzzle with some sort of contraption, or maybe there’s no floor and there are two nets hanging from the ceiling? (We know JINDAK doesn’t work on things you’re holding, after all, and you could be sitting on the carpet.)
But no. Coin-weighing puzzle with no explanation given for why the mechanics work that way.
The box, on the other hand, can be solved by accident. I’d stashed all my possessions somewhere to deal with the grouper, and found that suddenly the “blocked” exit worked! (This would admittedly work better if you didn’t have a bag of holding to keep all your excess inventory in. If I were designing it now, I’d make an earlier puzzle that restricts your inventory for some reason and prevents you from carrying the zipper. At the end of the puzzle you get a new cube, and since you’ve dropped the box, the exit will magically open.)
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I wanted the “can’t force your way through it” exits to clue “gold” somehow. Gold wall, gold-colored energy barrier, something.
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There’s also a small hint in that BLORPLEing anything that’s not a cube takes you to an empty room with an exit back to the object’s location. This suggests that there’s a connection between the BLORPLE exits and the actual physical location of the thing. But connecting that to the box is another leap of logic.
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I never would have solved it by accident. I kept things I wasn’t using in the zipper. I never would have put it on the ground in any case unless I was clued to do so. It just wouldn’t have ever happened for me.
Color might have worked. Or a sound. Anything that could have tied the impassable exit to the box. “Water room = picture of a dolphin” doesn’t get me there. Perhaps a compass rose on the box that points to the relevant impassable exit. IE, inserting earth cube displays moles and north.
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Also, @kamineko , what do you use for mapping? How do you get overlapping lines to properly cross over?
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I never played Spellbreaker myself, but a good friend did, and I still remember him muttering about the outcropping during a large part of the 90’s… I’ll ask him next time we talk if he solved it and how.
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I believe I did solve the box/outcropping puzzle back in the day, but again by having been lucky earlier on in finding what the box did. I think if the game contrived a way to force that, it would have made everything fairer. Maybe Spellbreaker is so hard that it’s reasonable to expect that players will have spent a long, long time banging their heads against the wall by this point. At any rate, it’s hard by design, not by accident. Lebling is quite committed to the idea of this being “expert level” IF, and we’re talking about the late middle game by now. We’ve made an amazing amount of progress and still we don’t understand fundamental things about its main mechanic. This is the effect Lebling wants, and I think it adds a great deal to the unique character of the game - which is really quite unlike either Enchanter or Sorcerer.
The design on the box changing is a beautiful touch, but it’s also a piece of misdirection, because it makes you think the purpose of the box is to identify cubes.
On the cube-weighing puzzle, yes, it’s a hoary old one, but I don’t agree that it doesn’t belong here. One of the game mechanics in Spellbreaker is the ability for the cubes to be written on. Up to now, they’ve all been initially blank - a natural game-design exercise with mechanics like this is to say, well, how about one that’s not initially blank. And I like the idea of lots of fake cubes, after we’ve been triggered to regard everything cubical as an object of desire.
(I think the Sand Room should be tinted in the map, by the way?)
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I mostly agree with Jimmy Maher’s piece on Spellbreaker, which considers questions of difficulty, fairness, and, most crucially to me, the player’s trust. As I’ve recently said elsewhere, Maher calls it “downright noble in its commitment to fairness.” This is high praise, and I feel it’s largely true. However, neither Maher nor anyone I’ve ever encountered has detailed the logical process by which they solved the box puzzle. It is usually a matter of dropping the box for some unrelated reason, then bumbling through an impassable exit while trying to do something else. It reminds me a bit of traversing the desert in The Wizard and the Princess.
None commenting on Maher’s piece (always a busy comment section there!) have a kind word for the box puzzle, and JM doesn’t come to its defense. He does speak up on behalf of the coin puzzle, and I’d be more comfortable speaking for it, too. This may surprise. I have been very critical of the atmosphere-destroying “brain teasers” in the back third of Zork III. I want cohesive worlds. I want innovation. On paper, the box ought to be a far better problem for me than the coin puzzle.
Ultimately, “this is a game for people who take items out of their carry-all and put them on the ground” is not a game for me. I am not that player. I am, in fact, a bit fussy about my inventory, and I think that’s done me more good than harm as a player. Where are the rules that say we ought to leave things lying on the ground? Where is the tradition that suggests it? How have the other Enchanter games (or the Zork trilogy for that matter) signposted this strategy? The world of the box is an arbitrary, capricious one. A world without history. Who knows why things happen the way they do in this world of outcroppings and boxes?
I go easier on the coin puzzle because, as a follow up to the box puzzle, it signals our return to a rules-based, logical world. Again, we can be assured that any problem, no matter how difficult, can be solved with patience, determination, and, perhaps, some good notes. This is what I want an “Expert” game to be! Equal parts difficult and solvable. The cliched nature of the coin puzzle actually works in its favor for me. Here, at last, is something I can figure out.
The vault has a negative effect on the narrative of Spellbreaker, but I think only something as transparently solvable as the coin puzzle would have regained my trust. Which it did.
Given the amount of time I’ve spent on Spellbreaker over the past several days, the box clearly hasn’t ruined our relationship.
[clears throat]
Where was I?
I wonder if that’s on Nathan’s bug list? Or if that counts as a bug?
I use a local installation of Trizbort for Windows. It mostly handles everything on its own. I point it to my transcript file, and off it goes. I understand there are other tools, but I’ve never tried any of them.
Edit: No Gold Machine post today! I have got to get my game out to testers.
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This surprising bug is going on my list.
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See, to me the coin puzzle is rules-based and logical but not consistent. The rules of both the game world and the game itself are altered here, without explanation: objects cannot be freely taken and dropped, SAVE and RESTORE are disabled, in order to make the puzzle work. That’s what frustrates me about it.
The box puzzle, on the other hand, is underclued and unfair, but is perfectly consistent. The box functions in the same way through the entire game; the game just never tells you about that function.
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Which is to say: if I were rewriting Spellbreaker I would overhaul both of them.
The coin-weighing puzzle would gain a narrative explanation for the new rules (you’re flying on the carpet, there are two nets of cubes hanging from above) and avoid altering the game’s meta-rules (you can save and restore freely but whichever cube you BLORPLE will always be the wrong one unless you’ve ruled out every alternative—Schrödinger’s Cube).
The gold box puzzle would be hinted by an earlier sequence that forces you to drop all magical objects to go through a certain map connection. (I freely admit I’m too fond of the old “passage that restricts inventory so you have to find a workaround” chestnut.) At the other end of the connection you’d find a new cube…but one that doesn’t connect back to any of the earlier areas. So the only way to get back to your other cubes (and zipper) is to use the magical exit. (The magical exit would also still work if the box was in the zipper; it’s only blocked if the box is enclosed by a cube-room.)
That one could probably also do with another hint, like the exit being blocked by gold or the box showing an arrow, as mentioned above. But I think the only way to make the volcano puzzle fair is to force the player to use the box earlier in the game.
(Part of my goal in writing Scroll Thief was to improve on some of the most frustrating parts of the Enchanter trilogy, so I’ve given far too much thought to this sort of thing.)
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Yeah, that all tracks. The coin puzzle makes assumptions about the audience in the way the “baseball” puzzle from Zork II does. I walk into a room, see two piles, see one brighter than the other, realize I have three turns, and I know it’s a coin puzzle.
Not everyone is going to have that background. They both could have used more time in the oven.
Of course, we are likely paying the price for C64 compatibility at this point…
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Honestly, I like Dyer’s argument that the baseball maze doesn’t really assume familiarity: most people (including both me and Dyer) seem to have solved it by watching for the lights getting brighter, and then getting a bit lucky with the starting point. I’m American and am familiar with baseball diamonds and didn’t realize that’s what the maze was supposed to be until afterward.
If it was meant to be solved by understanding baseball, home plate should have been a different shape (which would also make it a fairer puzzle since it ensures you can find the right starting point) and the bat shouldn’t have been described in a misleading way. If you describe a length of wood that’s burned at one end, I’m going to imagine a torch (the mediaeval kind), not an engraved baseball bat.
As an American kid in the 80’s, I loved that season. I found The Stones of Blood and The Power of Kroll especially scary. Tom Baker’s episodes were by far the most commonly run on American PBS stations. Until sometime in high school I thought he was the only Doctor, despite having seen the end of Jon Pertwee’s regen in Robot and the other faces shown in The Brain of Morbius. 
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Somewhere I have a papercraft model of the Key to Time. (The cube isn’t divided into sub-cubes; they’re irregular polyhedra.)
My PBS station spent a few years running Doctor Who from the beginning – as much as was then available – which I really appreciated. Got to see all the early Doctors. But after that, they somehow got stuck on the 1980 season. Or, rather, it seemed like they were stuck showing “The Leisure Hive” over and over. (Probably that’s just my memory being tricky, but…)
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Oh right, now I remember the box puzzle! Yeah, I’ll echo all the critiques. Part of what’s frustrating is that this could have been a solid puzzle – per the suggestions above, or just say “You feel a surge of magical feedback somewhere on your person” if you try to go through one of the “blocked” exits while carrying the box. Since it’s a two-part puzzle (you need to figure out how the box works, and then realize throwing it is the answer) it really needs more breadcrumbs.
More broadly though, the box gets at one of the critiques I have of Spellbreaker (that I think I mentioned in another thread? It’s hard to keep track!), namely that I find the underexplained nature of the cubes can make the game feel very abstract and ultimately “gamier” than it really deserves to feel. Sorcerer is very guilty of gaminess, of course, with the amusement park and the glass maze, but it’s transparent about it – it’s trying to be a fun, funny game and isn’t too fussed about anything else.
Spellbreaker clearly has bigger ambitions, but in practice I found it hard to engage with for some similar reasons: the core gameplay loop of looking for new cubes and BLORPLEing them can look a lot like jumping through portals to the lava level, the air level, etc. And then you’ve got magical tools like the burin and the box that seem designed to interface with the cubes, but with no real indication of their context they just feel like arbitrary things that are there to create and solve puzzles.
Again, this isn’t fully fair – it’s really significant that the different areas connect, for example, indicating that maybe what’s going on is that the cubes represent powerful magical forces, and blorple, by sympathetic magic, transports you to parts of the world where those forces hold sway (it’d help if you could blorple anything other than cubes – which I don’t think you can). And I guess we can assume that the shadowy figure made the box, or recovered it from the same origin as the cubes he’s been hiding, in order to “help” us on our journey? But you need to read very closely and make a bunch of assumptions in order to piece these potential explanations together, whereas the “it’s just a video game, doing video game things” reading is much more easily available.
I’m definitely no fan of overly-expository fantasy “lore” so I get the desire not to overexplain all this stuff, but I think this worldbuilding vagueness combines unhappily with the fuzziness of the protagonist’s overall aims – like, you’re trying to fix whatever’s wrong with magic and figure that chasing the shadowy figure and collecting cubes will help with that, but you never really clear on how you’re meant to manage it – in a way that winds up undercutting the story and pushing it closer to a Zelda-style “solve puzzles and collect the McGuffins in the different levels because that’s what you do in video games” plot than it really deserves.
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You can, but you always end up in a “Nondescript Room” that connects only to the object’s location. You’re effectively “inside” the object in a metaphysical sense.
This is actually an alternate solution for the ogre puzzle: if you use GIRGOL he’s frozen for two turns, then kills you immediately after (if he can find you). So you use your first turn to go into his lair and your second turn to BLORPLE the first thing you see. Wait in the Nondescript Room for a few minutes until the ogre loses track of you and goes back to guarding, and you now have uninterrupted access to the lair and everything in it.
Of course, you then can’t get to the top of the cliff, so you’ve made the game unwinnable. That’s how alternate solutions tend to work in these games.
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Yes, exactly. The way the puzzle is described, you ought to be able to put the 12 cubes in 12 piles of 1 each, requiring only 1 use of jindak. But no.
Those of you who’ve read The New Zork Times (later The Status Line) newsletters may recall Dave Lebling responding to a reader’s complaints about Starcross (Spring 1985 issue). In early 1986, this inspired me to write Lebling with my concerns about Spellbreaker. I tried to keep my comments on the positive side overall, emphasizing that it was a great game that could have been near perfect with a few improvements. Regarding this puzzle, I suggested, rather than nets, having 2 silver discs embedded in the floor that enhanced the powers of jindak (but the concept is the same).
I had hoped to hear Lebling’s defense of (what I thought were) the games weaknesses, but I never heard back, publicly or privately (although I can’t say I was surprised).
This reminds me that I want to go back and finish this game. I got stuck my first time through, but it’s getting time for another shot at it.
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