----blinks against sunlight----reaches under folding beach chair somehow dragged into Keyboard Stadion----twists open sunscreen tube----squirts generous blob into palm----rubs himself----
November, and the sun is still bright this late in the year. Harsh even, especially with it sitting so low in the sky. Which is why I thought to protect my skin agai…
----stops suddenly----inhales sharply----sniffs open sunscreen tube----
Mmhhh… Whenever I rub this stuff, the smell of it immediately transports me back in time to 1995, and across space to Czechia. A group of teenagers on an early-morning busride to the snow slopes. Checking our gloves and scarfs, zipping up our skiing onesies, pretending to be scuba-diving by making Darth Vader-like breathing noises with our snow-goggles on…
Preparing for our first day of skiing also meant putting on copious amounts of sunscreen. A whole bunch of us doing that at the same time in a bus with shoddy fresh air supply meant the smell of sunscreen hung heavy all around us.
So now when I put on sunscreen, I get a nostalgic shot of imagined skiing fun for free.
----listens to mumbling from the audience----“where’s he going with this? is he on the wrong thread? what’s Rovarsson’s blobby sunscreen fetish got to do with anything?”----raises hand reassuringly----
All this to say that our sense of smell is incredibly powerful for recovering memories and generating feelings, deeply nested in our brains as it is, communicating directly with emotional centers.
And standing here, in this magnificent Keyboard Stadion filled with the aromas of sizzling plists and broiling access predicates, inhaling the fragrant smoke of doojiggering dinguses and smoldering fairy wings (----“fairy wings? fairy wings! quick! get that bucket of tomato sauce!”----*SPLASH!*-----hands towel to fairy----), smelling how the distinctive scent of our chosen challenge ingredient slowly gets incorporated into the savoury bouquet of our chIFs’ dishes, my mind wanders, filled with memories and associations of games that came before…
Gently lifting the lid on one of @Draconis’ bubbling pots brings back, aside from definite hints of karbanátek and bramboračka, memories of one particular game more than any other. A game which I lost myself in for hours in the days of yore, when I was young and Flash was still in its prime. A SF game about a bumbling young interstellar explorer stranded in an alien nest, desperately trying to communicate with the inhabitants to gain their help in getting home. (Without accidentally telling them to “Lick my hairy whale shark balls!” and getting thrown into outer space…)
That game was Tork.
(Still image from the game Tork. The PC floats in the middle while
slug-like aliens float around them.)
Despite being a graphic game, its gameplay mechanism has a lot in common with @Draconis’ proposal. On the underside of the screen there is a rotating wheel of symbols. These symbols are collected by approaching an alien. The alien blurts out one or more of these symbols, sometimes accompanied by an action. Pressing the keyboard letter associated with the symbol makes your PC blurt that utterance back to an alien. From the alien’s actions and reactions, an approximation of the meaning can be inferred.
Now, where this system is really similar to Draconis’ is that once a symbol is in your collection, you type your guess as to its definition into the center of the symbol-wheel. Erasing that guess and replacing it with a better alternative can be done at any time, depending on your experiences with blurting out that word/phrase to various aliens.
Brilliant game, one of those from that era that I remember most fondly. Sadly, I couldn’t find a working version anywhere. (If anyone can, I would be deeply indebted to you.)
Approaching @Pacian’s cooking station on the other side of the Keyboard Stadion (quite a long walk actually, we’re spread out over more than a dozen timezones…), different herbs and spices hit my olfactory remembrance faculties…
The flashbacks here are more diffuse, memories and glimpses of a variety of games, all somewhat similar in some way, but none tasting quite like the unique brew that is simmering on Pacian’s stove.
From the photographs @Pacian posted of The Tome of Game Notes, I gather the game (tentatively called) The Fairy and Her Muscle-Man will be a one-room affair. The obvious one-room language game that comes to mind is of course Suveh Nux.
Suveh Nux has the protagonist locked in a magical strongroom. To escape the room, the protagonist has to uncover various enchantments and learn their meaning by experimenting with them on the sparse few objects in the room. No doubt, this experimentation leads to many and more shenanigans, a point of likeness with Pacian’s game as foretold in The Tome of Game Notes.
The most interesting phase of Suveh Nux happens once you’ve mastered enough of the magic words to be confident of their effects. Here, it becomes necessary not only to understand (i.e. translate) the enchantments, but to combine them into new spells. In other words, after discovering and translating the basic words, you must deduce and construct novel utterances in this magical language.
But what we’ve seen of Pacian’s preparations so far gives me the feeling that besides being a one-room language game, Suveh Nux might not share that many similarities with (tentatively called) The Fairy and Her Muscle-Man.
One thing that can easily make a world of difference is the presence of NPCs. In Suveh Nux, the protagonist is all alone in the magical strongroom. What a contrast with Pacian’s diverse cast of characters! Think of all the possibilities for interaction, influencing or persuading NPCs to act as you want them to… The Branching Tree of Interpersonal Shenanigans is much wider here!
But I detect another familiar smell in the smoke coming from Pacian’s oven
(@Pacian , you might want to check that smoking oven…), a smell that take me back to the Wild Wild West…
Hoosegow has nothing to do with translations or language puzzles. (Except if you count my headscratching trying to figure out what in the name of whale shark balls a “hoosegow” is… I seriously thought it was some sort of chicken coop until I looked it up.)
This game is, on the other hand, a multi-character one-room escape game filled to the brim with high-level shenanigans. Mentally visualising the room you’re in, its furniture and the spatial relations of that furniture to other furniture, your PC, and other characters is central to solving the chain of puzzles that will lead to your final escape.
In the minds of many of you, the lack of language-puzzles may immediately set Hoosegow apart from whatever Pacian will do in this contest, with this specific challenge ingredient. However, I urge you to take a good look at those pages from The TOME of Game Notes that I reffered to before.
-There’s a pencil drawing of the cave Pacian plans to use as the main (only?) location. It’s pretty evocative to my mind, with several elements precisely placed in the space. Especially the placement in the game-space of a “looming machine” with a drive-belt connecting to the edge of the gap below it feels like there could be a set-piece waiting for manipulation, presumably with the intermediary step of translating the *chirp* and *chu* of the Stranger’s meat-thermometer.
-The first glimpses of in-game text that Pacian chose to share with us were the character descriptions. These were from the deeply subjective viewpoint of the Fairy PC. A lot of interpersonal drama is already set up in these few bits of description, and given how skilled this author is with writing intricate characters, I for one am very curious how these possibilities will be exploited…
----tummy grumbles----tummy grumbles again, louder----
I am getting a bit hungry from all these delicious aromas. But we mustn’t be hasty. The dishes should be ready to taste in just a few days… I’ll just have to eat a ham-and-ghost sandwich instead.