I’m playing a bunch of short games in preparation for a presentation to high schoolers. I’ve hit two parser games that I can’t solve with the walkthroughs in less than 18 hours. One walkthrough refers to an object that just isn’t there (Move #16 of Gourmet by Aaron Reed and Chad Barb), and the other recommends something the game won’t let me do (Baking with Lizzie by Adri, walkthrough by David Welbourn).
It’s entirely possible that edits were made after the walkthroughs were written, and there just aren’t resources to keep things up to date. Or I might be losing my freaking mind. Or both, I guess.
There’s a particular problem with IF Comp entries such as this game, that in most cases there is/was a strong norm of providing a walkthrough with the competition version, but when a post-competition version comes out, it’s not always accompanied by an updated walkthrough. IFDB tends to link to the version of the walkthrough that exists, which might not match the recommended (post-comp) version of the story file.
Another problem with Comp entries is when the post-comp version of the walkthrough does exist, but is buried inside a zip file on the IF Archive with the updated story file, so IFDB can’t link directly to it (it can currently only link directly to playable games in zip files, although it at least recently gained the ability to provide a listing of the zip file too). Whereas until recent comps, the competition walkthrough has generally ended up as a top-level (linkable) file on the IF Archive; so, again, IFDB links to that old version. (Square Circle is an example of this – the post-comp walkthrough is (a) in a zip (b) different, although I don’t know how significant the differences are.)
In the case of Gourmet: the IF Archive only holds the competition version of the walkthrough; it doesn’t hold a walkthrough that’s documented as matching the post-competition game release.
However, Gourmet does have a website (which is still up after 22 years). And that website does have a walkthrough, which you might hope would match the post-comp release… sadly, it’s identical to the IF Archive / comp version, so doesn’t explain your problem.
I don’t actually know whether the problem is that the available walkthrough only matches the competition version, or was just always wrong, or what – I haven’t played the game.
(As it happens, I’m currently working backward through IF Comp years and improving IF Archive descriptions and IFDB entries for all the games; and the possibility of this sort of walkthrough mismatch has been bothering me. I’ve sometimes flagged a walkthrough on IFDB as being the competition version, as a clue, but not I think consistently. 2003, the year of Gourmet, happens to be my next to look at.)
David Welbourn’s walkthroughs do at least explicitly flag which version of the story they were created for.
For Gourmet, quickly playing through the competition version of the game (up until the First Course) with the one available walkthrough gives responses that make much more sense than putting the same commands into the post-competition game. So I think here it is my first case, that the walkthrough was never updated for the current version of the game.
You’re not supposed to? Here’s what the walkthrough said (the entire thing worked for me):
preheat oven. unwrap butter. put butter in mug. touch oven. put mug on oven.(It’s curved and can’t support it.) put mug on hot plate. turn on plate.(It’s not working?) touch lamp. put mug on lamp.(The butter melts.)
You may have tried to add the butter directly . You need to put it in the mug first.
(side note: it’s cool that copy/pasting from the David Welbourn walkthrough automatically adds the keyboard button thing to the commands and italics to the notes.)