I’ve been buzzing through some bits of it again, but it’s probably better to be playing with people who are actually solving the puzzles for the first time, yeah. If you have eight locations opened, you probably want to find the necessary tools if you haven’t yet (metal detector I think? and shovel and bolt cutters) and get the power on, and then be working up to the meta puzzle in the arcade (which Renzo tells you about - finding letters to get up to the special games in the VIP lounge). Or (also in the Lunarcade) you can find your way by careful observation to the ninth location. But yeah, lots left, I would imagine.
I am playing it and should be able to jump back into it this week. I have accessed all nine areas but there are at least a couple of areas within those that I haven’t been able to fully access yet, like the upper floors of the hotel and the broader monorail system
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Regarding shovel and metal detector and power, I’ve got them. I activated the monorail in the moonraker game, but not in real life, as far as I know. However bolt cutters, I haven’t found those yet, but have a good idea where they might be useful. I’ve only recovered one of the letters (a “D”) and I think I might know where to get a “C”, but haven’t collected enough tickets. This is the area where I’m spending most of my time for the last hour.
I’ve found Sanctuary Hotel, but can only access one or two locations of it.
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To progress in the Lunarcade you’re going to want to find these. Good news is you have all the equipment necessary to get them. Read through the spiral-bound notebook somewhere where the light is bright enough and you should get the next clue.
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@JohnD @Doug_Egan Oh! I will also say that if you look at the moon, you will see that today would be a very good day to go wading in the gardens… (this is kind of a big spoiler for a silly side bit, but it only unlocks sometimes). This is related to the safe in the mower shed and the safe in the orchard shed.
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I had noted that the moon reflects in the ocean creating a silver path. Are you saying that the game has a simulated lunar cycle? 
Or maybe I have inferred wrongly…
I haven’t yet opened the safe or gone wading in the gardens but I will try the latter
Yeah, the in-game moon tracks the real-world moon phase - it’s in Nils’s framework code that hooks the games together - and there’s at least that one thing that you can only see when the moon is full.
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I reached an ending for Junior Arithmancer! A fun game, especially with my background in mathematics. I will return to it later to optimize my score, but for now, I’ll move on to The Owl Consults, whose premise intrigues me. As with the previous game, I’ll add a review later.
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Ha, that was pretty funny (though if I’d spent hours solving it myself without a hint, maybe less so!)
I don’t think I would have bothered wading into the pond left to my own devices, especially as (that part of) the game does not accept ‘wade’ as a verb
Phew! Now that Iron ChIF is done, I can get back to Worlds Apart. I had just reached a room called Inside the Shelter and gotten a slew of interesting-looking inventory items…
With all the runner reports, the field chart is starting to look like one of those not-very-tidy server racks, but I find myself near the rear of the pack with just one completion so far. (@JohnD, @Scrooge200, @Lurker, @Draconis – we’d all better stop lollygagging. The first month is already over!)
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FYI: The Week Five update has been posted. (Sorry it was late again.)
I made good progress in Worlds Apart with another hour-plus session (currently at sunset, Day 1). The complexity of the story just keeps increasing! It’s going to take a lot to tie it all together satisfactorily, but there’s no doubt that author Suzanne Britton is shooting for the moon, here. This is pacing suitable for a novel, not a short story.
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Finished The Bones of Rosalinda.
- I don’t recall playing in third person past tense since The Colour of Magic, but maybe that’s more common in choice games.
- It’s definitely a choice game that wants to be a parser game, with a persistent map and the ability to drop and pick up items wherever. Still, the modern conveniences of links and subwindows help a lot with the central conceit of detaching your head and arms and sending them off on their own little missions.
- That was fun.
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Moondrop Isle explorations update:
- My map is up to date: 234 locations plus 48 uninteresting hotel rooms.
- I’m still making progress, but getting closer to referring to generously provided hints.
- Metagame: I’ve found the D, N and L. I know where the C and A are but haven’t been able to collect them… Yet
- I have four golf clubs but I’m not sure I want to play any more light-on-details text golf…
- I got the MONORAIL! working, peep-peep!! (Excuse the unsuitable sound effect)
- I’ve taken the audio tour, interesting, and I’ve mostly got the water running in the water park. But I still can’t ride on the water slide
- The flashlight, waders, metal detector and especially the bolt cutters are my friends.
- I keep finding lots of stuff, but much of it appears to have no practical use. Like pin badges and collectible drink cans.
- My aim now, apart from finding all the letters, is to get into all the domes and perhaps find a way of reading the glyphs.
I’ve not been idle @otistdog !
@Doug_Egan how are you getting along with it?
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Nice! While the domes are indeed tantalizing, that’s the last step before the final puzzle, so I’d recommend dealing with the letters first - you should be able to get one easily now that you have the monorail!! running. If you’re not having fun with the arcade games, try redeeming the strategy guide: it won’t cost you as much as you think and there are a couple sneaky tricks to get a pile of tickets.
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I’m way behind you. I’ve got the power going, and found all the major locations. I haven’t kept good maps, so I’m sure there may be map rooms I’ve overlooked. I’ve solved all of the kiosks, except for what I believe to be the last one, based on a previous hints thread. I solved a “maze” of kitchen locations and found myself in an inner garden which offered a new way down to the tunnels. I have only one golf club and no balls. I have a flashlight, but no waders or bolt cutters. I haven only one letter (the closest one to the bottom). I’ve spent a lot of time with the fortune teller and arcade machines.
This weekend I took some time away from it to work on my own WIP instead, as I had made a promise to myself to address all my first round beta feedback by June 15.
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I finished Worlds Apart – a very interesting work, unlike any other that I’ve tried before. A lot of people might call it highly polished, but to me some other word would work better… maybe “lush.” I’m astounded at the variety of supported interactions, and in particular at the way in which they were implemented in a manner that felt very smooth from the standpoint of grammar and mechanics.
It was difficult to get into this work. The person with whom I was playing it got frustrated with the device of throwing us into flashbacks and/or dream states without context (something that happens routinely) after about the fifth or sixth time and gave up. The fact that we needed to consult hints to figure out how to end those scenes didn’t help. Continuing on my own, I continued to use them but found that I was able to progress with fewer over time. My own recommendation would be to consult the hints freely; since there aren’t any genuine puzzles, I’m not sure that “hints” is even the right word here.
The dots do begin to connect, but the story doesn’t seem to make an attempt to tie everything together… at least, I don’t think it does. The coda at the end indicates something about the state of each significant secondary plot, but I don’t know whether these can interact with each other to substantially change anything about the way the story resolves. From my playthrough, the focus is on the death of the protagonist’s mother and the impact on the protagonist.
It’s hard to call this one a “game,” maybe something closer to a “story one can poke,” since it seems to allow much in the way of exploring the edges of each scene, even though the basic plot seems very railroaded. It seems as though the interactor has license to define the protagonist’s core attitudes in certain cases, but it’s not clear what impact this might have. The >INTERESTING response at the end of the game suggests that there were some aspects I missed even though I was certainly taking my time, and some things mentioned in IFDB reviews suggest more. (I’ll be interested to hear what @Joey has to say when done.)
I discovered that I was playing version 2.2, not the current 3.0 release from 2022, so there’s a chance I might try again some day; I suspect that the context of a previous run-through will make the opening scenes a lot less opaque. This one has been on my to-play list for ages, so I’m glad to have tried it here.
Looking at my options, I think Pytho’s Mask is next for me. (Hello, @Rovarsson and @Melisande!)
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Pytho’s Mask (D5) grows from an excellent conception and is enjoyable overall despite some significant, gameplay-affecting bugs at critical junctures. One can see the hints of the style that would come to full flower with Counterfeit Monkey: a plot dominated by interesting and meaningful conversations, a setting of long-established order beginning to crumble, a tapestry of fanciful history with significant threads woven directly into the protagonist’s present, characters that lean toward storybook archetypes but are leavened with base humanity, light puzzles to stimulate engagement without undue friction, PC agency depicted as greater freedom about what to think than what to do.
It’s unfortunate that the impact of its bugs is so prominent. They really detract from the flow of the player experience, and, in combination with certain other oversights yield the distinct impression of a work needing more development time. I encountered confusing (and confused) interaction with books in the library and rearranging goblets and even managed to enter a zombie state in the final moves, leaving the protagonist and Prince sitting silent next to each other with nothing to say (cue “The Sound of Silence”). (I had to restore and check the walkthrough to recover from the stalled ending. It’s not clear what went wrong… maybe just a failure to >WAIT at the end of the main line of conversation since I tried other topics? Something about the conversation options and actions I had chosen must not have been covered in the scene-management logic.)
How wonderful it would be to see this one as cleaned up, filled out and well-oiled as it clearly wants to be! Even as it stands it is definitely worth the hour or two of playtime just to experience the story.
Onward to The Bones of Rosalinda (C4). (Hello, @Hellzon!) I’ve certainly admired the other Trzaska games I’ve played lately, so I’m looking forward to it.
(P.S. The weekly update will go up tomorrow, so if anyone has new runner’s reports to make, now’s a good time!)
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I finished The Bones of Rosalinda. It went much faster than expected because I got sucked into it and lost track of time, completing the first 3/4 of it in one sitting. It’s a cute cast of characters and a novel set of puzzles within a satisfying story – bravo, @agat! It well deserves its XYZZY Award wins for Best Puzzles and Best Use of Innovation.
On reflection, it’s pretty impressive that it felt perfectly natural to try to bean the wizard with my own skull in the climax scene. That’s some solid PC identification!
Next up for me is Reflections at B3.
(EDIT: P.S., for anyone stuck on their current square – remember that you’re allowed to try a different route! I suppose it’s even OK to switch your starting square if you find that you can’t get any traction with it.)
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