You need some “material” to make the hat.
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Thanks, got it! (And finished!)
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…I just couldn’t get in to this one. Mine may be an unpopular opinion, judging from the enthusiasm in this thread, but I rather agree with matt w’s summary of the original Hard Puzzle: “deliberately bad game design is still bad game design.”
Now don’t get me wrong: a brutally hard, unfair puzzle game where the player needs to “cheat” to win is a fine concept and the kind of thing I would ordinarily greatly enjoy. But this concept does not excuse under-implemented object and room descriptions, guess-the-verb, general buggy behavior, and other such infuriating flourishes. I don’t see much appeal in forcing myself to push through these “intentionally bad” features of Hard Puzzle 4, and would have preferred a well-implemented game whose difficulty was actually some hard puzzles, though of course, your mileage may vary.
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Nah, I was waiting for someone to say that, and I mostly agree. I went in knowing that it was a “deliberately bad design” type of game, and being in the mood for that, and still nearly quit several times.
I’d be curious to hear more detail of what you felt was under-implemented or guess-the-verb or buggy, if you feel like talking about that.
I think that it should absolutely have described the direction of the exits from the rooms, especially since you can move them around later in the game. That didn’t add anything to the game, it was just an annoyance.
Personally I only ran into one puzzle (making the lever) where I had any guess-the-verb problems. The others seemed to respond to the verbs I’d expect, though I didn’t go around deliberately trying synonyms. They were more about “did you actually look at everything?” and “did you think to try using these objects in combination?” and such. Which of course is also fairly tedious and annoying.
Ditto with under-described objects and buggy behavior. There were places where bits were left out of the description until you examined things in more detail, or looked under things, or whatever. But that seemed in the spirit of hard unfair puzzles rather than deliberately poor implementation. And I didn’t see any actual “bugs” that weren’t (relatively) clearly signalled as such: the hole that you could stuff arbitrary amounts of objects into, and the ones listed in BUGLIST. But those were either red herrings that didn’t affect gameplay significantly or were pointed out as hints that you needed them to solve a puzzle. And the doors, which someone else suggested were buggy, were clearly explained as a security system and set up as a sort of Towers of Hanoi or Gray code puzzle. I’m not sure it was actually solvable, but again, that was probably intended as a hint that you needed to “cheat” to win.
I don’t play enough IF to really know that “oh, this is a default Inform error message” or “this is a common bug that less-experienced authors run into,” and I still often miss things because I don’t know all of the verbs that “everybody” expects parser works to use. So while I thought the framing as “bugs” was silly and meh, and I did find the game deliberately badly designed, The Wand or The Wizard Sniffer or Counterfeit Monkey also felt infuriatingly arbitrary to me in the way that parser puzzles often do, and this didn’t seem too much more infuriating for a deliberately hard game.
So I’m curious which details you found grating because of things I overlooked not knowing they were bad…
A fun, challenging, satisfying game. I’ve posted a review of it on my blog.