I come to you, august IF community, hat in hand and wracked with humility. Despite giving over an hour to The Coffee Cake Caper, I am unable to solve the FIRST (seemingly gating) mystery - the lie the carousel operator is telling. While I really like the mystery solving template here, I have thoroughly wrapped myself around the axle engaging the “WHY” question. Why do I think so? Why did the character do it? Why would this be true? I cannot push any dropdown options into any of those frameworks and keep balking at full on lawn mowering it. Might some kind soul point me the way? This is a unique mystery solving framework I really want to dig into (and review!) but I am stalled so early, both seem out of reach.
I am hoping that once I digest the acceptable answer, subsequent iterations will be more clear.
I personally had to go to the walkthrough for this, and there are later questions that I think are even trickier or at least more idiosyncratic, so I don’t think there’s any shame in doing so.
With that said, for this one the WHY part is the main tricky one (well, assuming you know the operator’s clothes are a costume, not a uniform). Some hints:
Why do people eat anything?
Is there a reason why the operator would have been especially hungry when he saw the dough?
Having to do with how much he’d been working, and when other food options were or weren’t available?
Ok, just knowing it existed is helpful! The Spring Thing “SOLUTION” link led me to a 404 page (which I assumed meant ‘did not exist’). Sure enough, present in the download!
Oh, it was like that for me when the games first went up too, but then Brian fixed something on the site – maybe you’re having a browser caching issue, but it should be working now hopefully?