If you’re trying to lower expectations on this thing, I can assure you you’re accomplishing completely the opposite! Speaking personally, I’d love a look behind the curtain – and I think I mentioned I’m considering doing a bonus update or updates at the end of the thread looking at publicly-available source text? – so I’m definitely hoping you’re able to wrangle it together!
Yeah, I mean I’m assuming I’m not going to get to the end and all the Cragne relatives’ll be like lol, why did you crawl into graves and sewers trying to figure out who we are in the Variegated Court, that’s just Backwater’s version of Model UN.
OMG I think now I need to add another bonus update where I try to win the thing with minimal turncount!
Yeah, I think that’s a good instinct – Daniel’s bridge was about the maximum I think I’d want as a hard gate, and that was clearly set up as a major dividing point between the first “act” of the game and the second. I will say, I think one thing that made your room work as well as it did is that it’s not actually that hard. Like, there’s a lot to do – and obviously my first time in I panicked and died – but it’s all pretty well-clued and there’s no super esoteric guess-the-verb stuff. Admittedly I did make it harder on myself by forgetting about the medicine cabinet, which is a risk of trying to cram so much stuff into a single(ish) location, but still, I always felt like I was making progress.
(Incidentally, my theory for how you win IF Comp is to make a big, well-written game with lots of fairly-easy puzzles. Just saying in case you ever decide to write a second thing, though honestly this one-and-done angle you’re currently playing is pretty awesome)