Oho! Thanks! This looks perfect.
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I could really use a hint for Course Correction. I’ve been unable to make any meaningful progress. The red scroll seems completely useless, since it makes everyone faster and the game strongly hints that this will in fact be a disadvantage to me. The other scrolls starts a chase that I can’t seen to win – summoning mist doesn’t help, and entering one of the doors gets me captured immediately. I haven’t found anything useful in any of the five locations. What do I do?
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The way I progressed:
Summon mist twice, then open the REZROV scroll (and neither of the others) at any location other than the Librum. (I did it at the Great Hall Landing Cradle.) This starts the chase.
As a falcon, you have an advantage in terms of speed—especially while diving. So go up to the top, then dive down twice in a row, and repeat until you’ve lost them. (Every time you dive, you gain a bit of advantage, and it adds up over time.) Summon mist as necessary.
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Indeed - everyone has probably already seen the separate post, but just so it’s all gathered here in one place, I’ll link it:
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IIRC I managed to win the chase after diving once with the speed scroll open, but I can’t remember what if anything I did to make the scroll benefit me more than the pursuers.
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I’m the kind of person who’s a sucker for writing that resonates with me tbh, which based on first impressions of both games, has me feeling slightly biased towards course correction.
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@Afterward , just tried to send you my transcript but it says you’re not accepting messages at the moment. I don’t think it’s me ,because I was able to PM someone else. So, if you ever want this transcript, perhaps one of the least interesting you’ll receive for your game, let me know.
-Wade
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[A reminder to the audience: It was rh who submitted the challenge ingredient candidate that was selected by the chefs in this episode. Thank you, @rh!]
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I’ve started Van Der Nagel, and I think I need pen and paper, lol. I loved course correction, but the use of everything like the odd meta mechanics so far in van der nagel leaves me slightly more biased towards it…
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I have now beaten everything (I think??) in Van der Nagel, except the zodiac puzzle. I became slightly obsessed with it, but now it’s finally time to play Course Correction!
Van der Nagel is my favorite puzzlefest in years, a genre I really like (and so I’m also a bit biased here), but CC seems like it’s something completely different, which is very exciting for this competition. And I’m certainly excited to play it!
And the judges are divided too! Down to the wire, not just in total (3-2) but also for most of the individual judges’ scores. Exciting stuff!
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Voting time! This really is a tough battle.
My thoughts, part one:
course correction is a short game with an immediately strong and compelling setting. You’re a falcon-person in a society of bird-people who build aeries up above the forest. You need to heist a powerful relic from the bird-royalty, and you’ve got some less-powerful relics you previously heisted to help you. Right away, this is a great plot hook. I’m of the opinion that parser games are better at conveying setting than plot—the vast majority of player inputs won’t advance the plot, but will reflect the setting—so Chef Lucian gets immediate points for that.
(It helps that the powerful relics are Zorkian spell scrolls, but with a unique twist—and then a second twist exposed later on. I’m sure it’s a great surprise that I like these.)
The puzzles are not the game’s strongest point, but using momentum and falcon skills to escape in a three-dimensional chase is fun, and the way it makes fun of “spells that should be very general but only work in highly niche situations” is (in my opinion) much better than the way Augmented Fourth does.
No, the setting and narrative are the focus here, and the changes of viewpoint are a lovely touch. I don’t know if there are actually multiple endings, but the choices I made led to an ending that seemed to reflect those choices in a very satisfying way, so I don’t feel the need to play again and potentially break the illusion.
Don’t get me wrong, the effects of the five-day writing time definitely show. There are various weird contradictions in the story that the author probably has answers for, but which couldn’t be explored in the allotted time: Constance is the lover of the bird queen and close with the queen’s young son, for example, but also all the falcons have been banished for a long time; Horatio has been writing letters to the queen daily, but he’s also been in prison with no contact with the outside world; only Horatio knows what happened with the BOSTRAT scroll, but also it’s still just sitting in its capsa instead of being burned to cover up the truth. I was also a bit disappointed that the “down” and “haste” capsae were never needed for anything; it might have been cleaner to have Constance only have stolen REZROV. But some red herrings must be permitted in a puzzle game.
Still, these didn’t really dampen my enjoyment, and overall I had a great experience with the game.
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If Van der Nagel Papyrus had a reasonably satisfying ending at the part where it’s like “hey you can quit now”, I would probably have voted for it. But despite offering the out, it very clearly doesn’t want to offer actual payoff for people who don’t want to stick around for the rest of the game, and then the rest of the game evolves into being about a mechanic I found incredibly tedious to deal with. I’m not good at it, which is part of the problem, but it’s also just very, very slow and the exciting moments of discovery are few and far between. Mathbrush talked in his evaluation of the game about the strategy of making a game feel bigger by, for example, putting a key very far from a lock, and I think that’s exactly what I don’t like about Van der Nagel Papyrus—I’m just not finding it rewarding to find a key and then slog along for thirty minutes trying to get to the lock I know it goes to. But it is an impressive technical achievement in that it implements some complex and unusual mechanics and has almost no bugs despite doing that on a strict time limit.
course correction is rougher around the edges, but it has a lot of heart. The characters were very endearing and the worldbuilding was intriguing, and it had a unique and narratively interesting take on the classic trope of spell scrolls. The puzzles aren’t the point, but gameplay-wise I think it pulls off a propulsive, urgent feeling that can be hard to do effectively in IF, especially parser IF.
I definitely hope for a post-comp release with some bugfixes and maybe a little smoothing out/clarification of some story elements, especially close to the end. But on a fundamental level it works for me, whereas with VdNP I was not clicking with the higher-level game design choices.
Edit: “But EJ,” you might say, “are you perhaps just biased in favor of lesbians doing heists?” No, absolutely not. Why would you even think that.
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Part two:
The Van der Nagel Papyrus is the opposite of course correction in many ways. It starts with the barest of hooks: the historic van der Nagel mansion is being demolished tomorrow, so you need to get in and explore before that happens, ideally recovering some loot in the process. This sort of puzzlebox is a time-honored tradition in parser IF, and this one doesn’t disappoint.
You start by exploring and trying to map out the whole mansion and learn about its vanished occultist owners. You come across various locked cabinets and barred doors. You eventually discover the eponymous Van der Nagel Papyrus, which warps its surroundings. You use it to open some of these cabinets, which gets you a turquoise ring, which lets you modify the Papyrus’s effects…
And so on and so forth. Puzzles lead to more puzzles, and deeper layers of mechanics, and clues pointing to something even greater. The Papyrus reveals strange messages in the room titles, other papyri appear, and hints at how to read them, until eventually you get the power to reshape the map itself and change seemingly-immutable facts about the world. It’s fantastic!
…and that’s about where I hit a wall. Like with course correction, the five-day development time has left its mark on the game, and in this case it’s the rough edges in the user experience.
- There’s a map item in the game, for example, which shows an ASCII-art map of the mansion—invaluable for tracking the state of the world. But you have to examine it every turn to see the map, rather than having a MAP command or (even better) showing it in a side panel like in a DiBianca game. Later on, there’s a way to see it every turn, but it requires leaving the physical item behind, so then you can only see it in that one specific room.
- The map is large and sparse, as these sorts of puzzles tend to require, but that means most of my time was spent checking the map, putting in long sequences of directional commands, getting them wrong, checking the map again, and so on. A GO TO command (or even better, a clickable map) would have made this part of the experience much less painful.
- At one point, you get a message saying “you can now make the game unwinnable at any time, so be sure to save your game here”; but the game doesn’t make an autosave for you, or keep the game from being unwinnable in the first place by (e.g.) having a “reset this puzzle to its initial state” button.
All of those problems can definitely be fixed in Inform 7—but not, it seems, in five days.
So by the time I got to the rearrange-the-map layer of the game, I was finding it more frustrating than fun. The puzzles are fantastic, and I very much want to see what other secrets the game has to offer; working through them with others on the forum was great! And I’ll definitely play through to completion once there’s a walkthrough available. But all these rough edges meant I was no longer enjoying the experience, so I decided to stop there.
Is this the Chef’s fault, or mine? The game, after all, outright told me “hey you’re welcome to stop here and not go any farther, the rest of the game is hard”. But it’s a well-known rule of cooking shows that everything on the plate gets judged, so a tough, unappetizing garnish can get a worse score than no garnish at all. Chef Ryan made the choice to aim for such a huge and impressive game, and unfortunately, he (in my opinion) flew too close to the sun.
Thus, my vote in this competition goes to Chef Lucian, for course correction.
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… Well, based on my earlier post, it’s no surprise I voted for course correction 
I was able to eat the dish!
At a pre-intellectual level, I see myself sitting down to eat like on the Iron Chef TV show, and with one of the dishes, I was only able to nibble the sides. The rest of it had padlocked lids over it I was incapable of removing. So there was no contest in this particular contest.
Besides which, I ate and really liked the other dish. It was obviously more to my own taste in general as well. It has an intimate feel, specific world aesthetic, and is written for the PCs and their thoughts and drives.
It looks like VNP (did I call it that before? Sorry, I give it a different initialism every time), whatever happens here, may go on to be one of the great puzzle-puzzle-puzzle games. But it sounds like it will need a lot of refinement, too, especially in the quality of life areas. I think puzzle games definitely need command shortcuts/macros for any actions you have to repeat and experiment with. With my own iffy typing stamina, I can’t play them if they don’t. This is a separate issue to me sucking at some kinds of them.
-Wade
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I know this is rhetoric as part of an evaluation.
Still, objectivity we strive for, though if it were fully achievable and we overstrived for it, we’d all come to the same judgment. So your taste definitely has to modify it. Then the flipside is if it’s all taste and you don’t bring your evaluative experience, you’re no judge.
I’m a bit more wary of objectivity in the latter half of my life. If I look at something like IMDB, where I’ve got thousands of film ratings, I ask myself why have I rated so many films that have been importantly wound up in the fabric of my life for decades lower than some films which I thought were really high quality but which I never saw again or was even motivated to see again? Well, I know why. Objectivity and my history of reviewing.
There’s some kind of failure of the evaluative process here in terms of what a stranger would think if they looked at the data, whether they knew me or not. But the data’s all they’ve got, so that’s all they will see. It turns out the data neither reflects my own life, nor what I really feel, but it’s all that’s speaking to the corpus. It reflects some attempt at objectively assessing good filmmaking. Horror movies, with all their rough edges, consistently struggle on that scale, but they’re actually the ones most important to me. Are they all Really worse? Of course not! It’s just the only tool we’re able to measure by is somehow not suited to the task. Yet for want of better, and having been in a lot of critical action for decades, it still mostly oversees what my hands do.
-Wade
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[!warning]- Disclaimer
- I didn’t actually finish playing either entry before casting my vote.
- I played the ‘official’ downloadable version of each entry.
While both games, objectively speaking, equally deserve to win in my honest opinion, I did end up voting for course correction, on account of finding it more reminiscent of the games that got me into IF in the first place.
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There’s a sense maybe in which your specific taste allows you to see objective quality that others cannot see. For instance, I’m probably quite bad at seeing the objective qualities of horror movies, and you are quite good at it. I really don’t like attempts to scare me or gross me out, and of course this gets in the way of appreciating the film. But if I were asked to judge a horror film, nobody will be any wiser if I just tell them that I didn’t like being scared. I should still try to convey something about the work itself!
I don’t think the ideal is to take up the position of some neutral observer. The ideal is more to let the work speak through you, and that might mean neglecting idiosyncratic features of your own taste that make you less able to engage with the work. If that makes sense?
(It might also mean neglecting features of yourself that made the experience great without much help from the work itself: ‘wow, this book really reminded me of my much missed uncle John because it used to be his favourite, 10/10!’ is just as irrelevant as ‘man I don’t like mysteries and never want to see another detective again, 2/10.’)
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Even though this is the second time through, we’re still in the process of refining the show. To help us gather some feedback about the experimental beta testing policy, please take a moment to answer the following:
I think that the “free for all” model of beta testing, in which chefs are free to arrange as many beta testers as often as they like, made the contest…
- more fair
- less fair
- about the same
0
voters
I also think that the “free for all” model of beta testing made the contest…
- more interesting
- less interesting
- about the same
0
voters
In my opinion, for future episodes beta testing should be…
- allowed with the “free for all” rules seen here
- allowed with more restrictive rules
- not allowed
0
voters
Note that because this information will affect long-term policy, voting is anonymous but restricted to those who have registered as official Tasters. If you’re a fan of the show but aren’t a Taster, it takes about 10 seconds to change that. Just go to the official group page and click the “Join” button at top right – you should be able to vote immediately after.
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I definitely wanted to stickybeak to see someone else’s debugging process. In the abstract (and in how I actually do it!) I think of debugging working best as asynchronous communication. Tester plays, tester sends a transcript, I can work on each point I see or they raised and send questions if needed. Incredibly rarely, I would go to real time chatting to tease something out with the tester.
Each fix point requires a bunch of thought, that sequence of ‘Hang on… but if… what if I try… wait that’s not it…’ which can last from seconds, if you’re lucky, to hours wrapped around multiple failed attempts.
What I see is that in @lpsmith 's Discord version, he necessarily had to type out the full process of every one of those conversations I’d conduct in my head 
… with @Ally supplying the other half.
I guess there’s no time to be too asynchronous in Iron CHIF. I’m just glad I don’t have to debug this way. My arms would fall off.
-Wade
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Certainly for most of the 5 days, it was all async. But with mere hours to go, that got dropped.
There were a few things at work:
- I think better when I have to organize my thoughts into sentences, whether I’m just writing things down (cf my bug reports to myself) or talking to someone else, either talking or typing.
- I was really tired! Having someone to talk to not only helped focus my scattered brain, but also provided a nice little dopamine hit every time I could say ‘fixed!’ and Ally would say ‘Oh yay!!!’
- When things are confusing, I actually think and type at about the same speed, so it didn’t represent a slowdown in bug-fixing.
It suddenly occurs to me that my Iron ChIF story both began and ended with a conversation: at the beginning on my walk with my son, and at the end debugging things with Ally. I like that those are the bookends of that journey!
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