A shame, it sounds wonderful. Also what was the long title for ATSS?
Writing by blathering on.
What about the case where it can’t be so broken down?
At least it’s only probable… I can have my fingers crossed waiting for a sequel…
Post-game bonuses are always nice—who doesn’t love Slouching Towards Bedlam’s appendices.
I mean the invisiclues seemed perfectly serviceable as hints to me. The difficulty of the game to me was that it forced me to resort to them in the first place.
Perhaps because I recently saw a video of Bucky the rescue dolphin (who lived to 42, a pretty good age for a dolphin) my mind went immediately to the clicks, whistles, and acrobatics of “So long and thanks for all the fish.”
I’m a big Tchaikovsky fan and very much enjoyed Children of Time so you’ve put Ruin on my list for when I finish The Expanse saga.
I Was the Stranger’s Snack in the Ancient Sanctum
Isn’t that technically inaccurate since the husks were eaten by the spider but the fairy protagonist wasn’t? :P
Is the apple in your lunchbox not still your snack before you eat it?
Fair point—I suppose I was reading the release of the fairy at the end into the situation when I shouldn’t have; I was presuming that eating the fairies was a secondary benefit of keeping the fairies to fulfil the protag’s item finding role. If the fairies being eaten was the whole point of keeping them, I guess it would be more equivalent to raising a pig to eat it and then keeping it around because you find out it’s surprisingly good at truffle hunting (yes, I know that’s not how it works)?
I don’t really want to override anyone’s interpretation of the game - for me half the fun of making these things is leaving stuff out which players can make up for themselves.
Fair enough, I’m quite sympathetic to that actually.
And the defamiliarisation is good at making you not notice it’s a medium-dry-goods puzzle until it’s pointed out—I didn’t perceive it as having any until reading this review, tbh.
Reading that provoked images of a fantasy Stakhanovite man statue in me, tbh.
And perhaps the moderns as well, considering the metal something…
There’s some sort of triangle of identities point inchoate here, or possibly a joke about the old notion of the parser as “your eyes and ears”.
That sort of gels with my experience—it’s possible to get access to the whole map and get stuck because your translations are off and there’s no intuitive grip on how to rearrange it.
I encountered that and dealt with it by dropping the pouch in a room where I had checked out all the shiny things. That room was highlighted in the VOCAB response. A sort of unintentional “Aha!” moment.
The brief resurgence after you teleport to the debris ameliorates it slightly.
This cake clearly wins the “Most Likely to Be Used As A Romantic Gift By A Spider” ribbon. :')
This cake clearly wins the “Most Likely To Be Destroyed In A Tragic Teleportation Accident” ribbon. :P
This post is so excellent! I love seeing the brainstorming process in action and watching how others approach it.
Edit: The above comment was referencing this post, BTW: Iron ChIF: Pilot Episode (Pacian vs. Draconis, using Dialog) - #41 by Pacian
I posted it to the wrong thread and the reference broke when it was merged here.
Spoilers for ATSS
The audience thread feels like the right place for this—I enjoy how people had distinctly different interpretations of the objects. I took these as a suit of armor and a screwdriver.
I had that interpretation as well, but the idea of a spider holding a screwdriver-sized toothpick is amusing.
Brilliant series! Don’t forget the collection of short stories Memory’s Legion.
I feel like the shiny man is more open to interpretation: both toothpick and screwdriver are suggested by the text so that’s more a question of whether you adjust your mental label or just keep using the one you had?
The fairy says:
The thin metal part of this doodad is certainly used by large humans, like Trala, to dislodge food from their teeth.
but then later:
The stranger pokes the doodad into each bit in turn, rotating it and causing the bits to worm disturbingly out of the little door and fall on the floor.
> bits
Now that they’re lying on the floor, the bits look weird and ugly.
Also “worm disturbingly out” is such a great phrase for screws
Yeah, I took that as the fairy getting things humorously wrong: Trala is big enough that she can use a small flathead screwdriver as a toothpick. Having a “thin metal part” but not being entirely metal makes me think of a screwdriver with metal shaft and tip and plastic/rubber handle.
For the shiny man, I originally assumed some kind of automaton also, but when it’s smashed, it’s noted as “hollow” and containing nothing except the whosit (a brass key).
I don’t want to ruin things by over-explaining, but also I didn’t do a great job of conveying this in the game, so I’ll put it in a dropdown:
The “strange blackness” is meant to be like Niven’s stasis fields: it keeps whatever’s inside it frozen in time (and thus unable to be harmed). When the alien ship crashed, stasis fields sealed away the crew, cargo, and essential mechanisms to protect them until an eventual rescue. Which would work great…if they were anywhere except Europa, because undoing the stasis field is easy if you know how, but recovering things sunk in the ocean under miles of ice is not.
Such are the perils of a protagonist who doesn’t understand what they’re describing!
Well, they managed to be rescued in the end, so it technically did work out if only because the protagonist got wrecked without such a fancy preservation system
FWIW that was my read on what the black stuff was (though I wasn’t sure whether the crew was actually locked away, or if they’d all been in one of the destroyed arms); it kinda reminded me of the “fractures” in Hadean Lands both narratively and how it serves to keep the playable area in a larger ship more compact.
That was definitely an inspiration! Niven’s stasis fields were perfectly shiny, because they reflected all radiation, but “shiny” was already an important word in the game, so I looked at Hadean Lands and went with void-y instead.
It’s never specified in the game, so this isn’t necessarily canon, but my take is that one of the destroyed arms was the crew quarters, so the crew is mostly scattered across the ice, but in stasis so that they can be rescued if the distress signal is received in time. The debris field you find is the remains of the engineering section, and the last missing arm is propulsion. The blackness in the central chamber is sealing off the damaged arms in an (ultimately ineffective) attempt to prevent loss of atmosphere to the others.
As an audience voter, this is a tough one! I prefer Endymion’s game design and feel like it’s a lot more streamlined; I always felt like I had a clear sense of forward movement despite the difficulty level, while Ancient Treasure, Secret Spider felt unwieldy in the early game. At the same time, ATSS wins for me on story and narrative voice, with one of the more memorable PCs I’ve encountered lately. (Sometimes it’s just fun to play a little shithead, what can I say?)
No one has ever accused me of being too decisive, it’s true.