I still haven’t even made the lens! Where did you find a rim?
Put the glass disk in the metal collar. You can either find both in the Waiting Room or make them from other things: the glass bottle and the bio suit, respectively.
Edit: Also I think the airlock might have to be facing up.
Ahhh I thought the object itself was called “rim”. But now I can’t figure out how to use the lens! LOOK THROUGH LENS AT X and LOOK AT X THROUGH LENS and WITH LENS and various other commands don’t work.
There’s a place where you can put it. It’s not necessary for the wedding though. I think that you can ignore it until you need to magnify something, and then it will be clear how to use it?
Well. I managed to get on the purple altar, and it did nothing!
I’m still no closer to figuring out the music. I’ve tried entering a bunch of numbers into the keypad on the Exchange, including the telephone number from J Crimp and Sons, and some numbers from the decompiled text. No luck!
Aw. That’s disappointing. I won without that, but I was hoping it would do something cool if you did figure out a way.
As for the music, I turned out to be on the right track about the Exchange: you attack it.
The code for the Exchange you do get from its makers, i.e. chatting with Jeremiah after the wedding (and other things) give you the answers to the security questions.
How do you get out of the waiting room?
By cheating: see decompile. Or to completely spoil it, cli and then cmd to see your options from there.
Edit: or, of course, by solving the puzzle found there but that has several parts and puts you at just about the end of the game: I suspect it’s possible to win the game without “cheating” but I doubt if I’ll bother to work it out for sure.
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Thanks, Josh! Cheating was indeed what helped me get to the waiting room. From decompile, the only thing I could get was the 8G exploit. What else in the decompile output is useful?
There’s another command (well, actually sort of two) hidden in the listing.
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I DID IT! I BEAT HARD PUZZLE 4!
On the whole, a magnificent game. Absolutely infuriating, horrible, filled with broken code and typos, with puzzles that make no narrative sense, and, above all, an atrocious fit for this competition, where nobody has the time to beat their head against brick wall after brick wall for how many hours did this take me? Way more than two, that’s for sure! I’m giving it a 10. No other score is possible!
As for how it stacks up to the other games in the trilogy, this might be the best or it might be the worst. I don’t think it’s as elegant as the others. No, scratch that: it’s not. And in many respects, it’s less sneaky. Despite its chaotic nature, it’s a much more traditional parser puzzle game. But it does some really ingenious things, and some really tremendously stupid things, and that’s the Hard Puzzle magic: this fusion between brilliance and inspired incompetence. And the stuff that you fiddle with is more fun to fiddle with this time. More variety than the other Hard Puzzles. More moving parts.
Oddly enough, even though it’s the opposite of a crowd-pleaser, it does feel like it’s been designed to please a larger crowd than its predecessors. As though IFComp is the right venue for it, while also being the wrong one. Another Hard Puzzle contradiction!
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Yes, I was drawn to the lively banter in this thread when I fired up the forums this year, so I non-randomly started playing this game first.
I didn’t finish it, but actually I’d love to come back to it when it gets cleaned up. The bugs, noted (and celebrated) above in the thread, are discouraging because they seem so crucial. I’m a guy who likes to open up Excel and work out the state machine of the doors in this game, but SOMEwhere the game isn’t keeping an accurate record of which ones are open. Or something. That and Bob is failing to open doors that should be openable, which looks like a broken puzzle too.
However, progress can be made with enough fiddling, and even without benefit of the above comments, I would have had enough faith that there was most likely always a way forward. I get that from, for one thing, the fact that it’s a familiar author, but also from some quality, quippy writing and a general style and form that make this thing feel so strangely representative of (at least a branch of) IF. Somehow there’s a good sense here that the game is going to give you everything you need plus some insanity on the side.
I had a chuckle when I discovered the stool from the cover art is not the wooden one first presented in the game but can be found… elsewhere. I had a grinning good time taking a stab at this one. I don’t know yet if I’ll be scoring games this year, btw.
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Wait, are there actually bugs? I thought that was just @CMG falling in with the game’s meta-story or whatever you want to call it. I assumed it was all intentional. Locking Bob in a particular area can let you do things with the stool (not that you ever need to, I think, but it’s a handy item to experiment on). And the doors…it seems to do the checking-for-conflicting-doors before giving you the message about the door already being open/closed, but that seems in line with the rest of the game’s deliberately not telling you things (like which directions the exits are, or what’s under the table or whatever).
Maybe I’m totally off-base, not having played any of the others, but it all felt deliberately infuriating to me, not accidentally buggy.
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There are actual bugs, but there are a lot more “bugs.” And the actual bugs are almost certainly things that would be (or were) left there on purpose if Ade knew about them (or knows). It’s part of the Hard Puzzle style to never know what’s broken or “broken” at first.
The thing with the doors, for example: that’s a “bug.” There’s an easy way for the player to eliminate that entire “puzzle.”
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By the way, I’m just starting this. Did any of you read the ‘walkthrough’ and/or go to the jcrimpandsons blog? Did any of you try chatting with a customer service representative? I haven’t been able to find my name lol
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Yes, that’s the wormhole I mentioned earlier!
So fun! Ade’s crazy
I was going to try to just power through this one and get hints from you guys, but I think I’ll save this for those lean days of comp-winter when all the other games are over
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This game broke me. I’m trying to play other comp games now and my brain feels like pure mush
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Yup, I Google-translated all the bits from the “walkthrough” - hilarious. And talking to the customer service representative is (eventually) part of the game. Very clever.
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Which object can you be friendly with to make takeable??
I’m also currently trying to find out what to do with the airlock to get the hat. I’ve tried pointing it down to get into the ocean, and putting Bob in the ocean, but that doesn’t seem very helpful!
Edit:Nevermind, I got the answer to the first part.Still working on the second!