The Missing City Council
by Solarius
Ha! I made it through without a walkthrough. What a wild ride of a game. So underimplemented in most places (you can take city hall but not fight city hall, the Register Office door leaks some of the default locked descriptions and is totally not described as sticky when it’s only using locked as a mechanical shorthand for “the door is stuck, give it a shove” - gosh, that last took me forever to figure out) but then over-implemented in others (the scanner won’t turn on unless there’s something on it, and then your cup of hot tea cools down after… 12 turns? And the Earl Grey tea in the cup seems to have no user-facing name, presumably in an effort to avoid colliding with the box of tea? Which… doesn’t seem to be necessary at all, except maybe that it clues that you want the lemon drop).
And then there’s the bonkers plot where King George V apparently tries to invade Finland, gets caught in a magnetic storm and time-travels 108 years forward… which you only find out at the very end… I have no idea why this arbitrary piece from the Met is apparently in a sauna in Finland, only someone took it out of the box and used it to lock the door to the sauna on the other artworks? Did the council steal the artwork? Why? Did George go on an international art theft spree while time-travelling? Who knows? Cool cool.
Also a sauna seems like a terrible place to store delicate artworks: I was thinking at first that well, maybe the sauna isn’t in use? But if it melted one of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled installations into a somewhat solid block of candies, then it’s obviously at least hot in there if not wet (aside: I think that was my favorite puzzle of the game, I definitely laughed at that one).
Very creative and wacky, but unfortunately an untested mess.