Something I’d do to fix this puzzle would be to periodically have you be able to hear the sound of “something” (a big rock) smashing down when you’re in the four neighbouring rooms. That way, you would be aware that you need to be there when it happens in order to catch one. (I understand we’d be able to see the rain of rocks from neighbouring rooms as well, but in the interest of it being irritating to get messages from another room every time we’re in another room, we can ignore that.)
3 Likes
Now, let’s find out what comes next!
When we left off, we had a rabbit resting contentedly among the apes, and a woodpecker upset about the destruction of its home. Maybe we can make the woodpecker a new home.
>catch woodpecker
The woodpecker, for some reason drawn to you, is easily captured, though only a few seconds in the wicker cage are enough to teach it the error of its ways.
I was actually holding the rod when this happened, so it seems the bird isn’t frightened of it the way it is in Colossal Cave. Only rabbits fear this particular rod.
>x woodpecker
You know. Sharp pointy beak, insistent manner.To get even with you, the woodpecker begins to peck away at the wooden bars of the cage.
Uh oh. Hopefully it won’t break out. I have a backup save file just in case.
We now have 16/16 sketches, so we can focus on our real goal: getting our grenade back! Currently it’s held by the apes:
The apes are amusing themselves playing catch with their new metal toy, the grenade.
But there’s also a second paragraph about the apes in the room description:
The apes scan the horizon.
And while sketching the rabbit, the apes did something too:
The apes pretend to look intelligently at each other and make motions with little twigs in their hands.
It appears they’re aping our actions! The “scanning the horizon” is because, after going to a new room, Inform executes a “Look” action.
Let’s see if this is true:
>jump
You jump on the spot, fruitlessly.The apes leap about foolishly.
Aha! So this is how we manipulate the apes. We need to come up with an action that will make them return the grenade. We can’t just take it, since the apes will also take it:
>take grenade
Whenever you get close to the ape with the grenade, he or she throws it over your head to one of the other ones (who catches it by the pin, alarmingly).The apes pantomime picking up something.
But what about giving?
The constant rat-at-at from the cage makes you begin to wonder if wicker is the ideal material to hold a woodpecker.
Oh. We should also probably be worried about that.
Anyway, looking through our inventory, we have many things we no longer need.
The apes comically count their imagined possessions.
Let’s take the checklist out of the rucksack…
The apes pantomime picking up something.
…and hand it over!
The apes decline your offer. Catching on, one of them makes an elaborate mime of offering the hand grenade… to another ape, who equally impressively mimes a refusal. They soon go back to playing catch.
Aww.
The woodpecker is, of course, still patiently pecking its way to freedom.
Yeah, we should really be worrying about that at some point…
The rabbit scratches behind its ear, and the apes follow suit.
And this is another hint, in case we hadn’t picked up on the apes’ behavior by now. Much appreciated.
So far the apes have responded to every action I’ve tried, with some amusing results:
>sing
Your singing is abominable.There is a good deal of tedious whooping.
>hit ape
The apes imitate your attack with a much more painful and effective reply.
>throw checklist at apes
The apes pick up the checklist (which of course missed) and juggle for a while with the grenade. Eventually, to your annoyance, they throw back the wrong one (and miss you).
But none have yet gotten the grenade back. (“The wrong one” means the checklist, not the grenade.)
Well, what else do we have to work on? We have a woodpecker that’s going to break free soon. Still thinking about Colossal Cave, I tried releasing it near that huge spider:
>free woodpecker
The woodpecker soars angrily out of the cage. With the kind of shock that would give weaker travellers cardiac arrest, the giant spider leaps off the web, giving it a mighty shake, attempting to snare the woodpecker, which only just flies straight up and out of its eightfold grasp. The spider looks malevolently at you but returns to the web.
The custom response suggests this will do something useful under different circumstances, but now isn’t the time. Undoing that. The web crosses the culvert, so I thought getting the apes to throw the grenade into the river might end up with it caught in the web, but no dice:
>throw checklist in river
The checklist is washed away to the east by the fast canal waters. The apes make a great fuss of throwing stones into the river, too.
The checklist isn’t in the web, it’s just gone. No great loss. More importantly, the apes only threw stones, not the grenade.
We also have this amulet, inscribed “The Wealth of Plato”, and sculptures of Platonic solids at each corner of the Land. So I tried standing under the icosahedron and testing random verbs on the amulet; for most of them, “nothing obvious happens”, but the key seems to be RUB.
>rub amulet
The great icosahedron spins gracefully into a blur of motion for a second or two, and a gemstone flies out to land before you!
Ooh! Shiny!
Cut into what seems a perfect polyhedron, about an inch across.
The other Platonic solids now spin the same way if we rub the amulet, but don’t give us any more gems. It seems it’s a one-gem-per-amulet kind of deal.
I’m pretty sure we’re in a walking dead state again, since the woodpecker is about to escape and we haven’t done anything useful with it. But before we worry about that, we need to figure out how to get our grenade back from the apes.
What are some more actions to try—either in search of amusing responses, or to actually steal back our grenade?
2 Likes
Have you tried to simply DROP something?
Or PUT/THROW something into an open container (rather than the river)?
More macabre than amusing, perhaps, but is there something in your inventory you can PULL?
1 Like
The apes refused the checklist as it was uninteresting, it says. If you gave them something interesting, would they keep it? Like the rod or something else?
1 Like
>drop strongbox
Dropped.One ape, intelligence flickering to life in her primate brain, apes you so well as to drop the grenade on the ground.
>get grenade
So quick are the apes on the uptake, this time, that one of them reaches down and picks up the grenade even before you can reach it.
>put chit in strongbox
You put the chit signed by Lenin into the metal strongbox.
No reaction by the apes to this one! Same for THROW which seems to map to the same action.
No reaction from the apes on this one either, sadly. I was hoping for an amusing and potentially hint-bearing death.
The rod and the berliner got the same refusal. I thought they might show interest in food, but it seems not.
I’m going to make a list of actions I’ve tried, to see if that reveals any noticeable gaps:
The apes mimic: inventory, wait, take, drop, attack, wave, throw, rub, show, kiss, sing
The apes ignore: go, put in, push, pull, turn, eat, sleep, wave
The apes also mimic giving commands:
>apes, give me the grenade
The apes mouth plausible silent nonsense in reply.
…
Wait a moment…
AHA! Found it! What if we throw something, not at the apes, but at the rabbit?
>throw chit at rabbit
The rabbit scampers to avoid the chit signed by Lenin, and the apes all mime throwing something at the rabbit as well, one of them even hurling the grenade. But she misses, and the grenade flies away some way to the east.
Sorry, rabbit. But it had to be done. Throwing at something that’s inanimate just gets an error message. (“Futile.”)
So where did it end up? The apes threw it remarkably far:
Ash River Culvert
To the north, the Ash River, sick with grey sludge, drains into a culvert in the sheer mountain wall which runs along the eastern border of the Land.Above the culvert, waiting on a tough-looking web, is a two-foot furry spider.
Held clinging to the tough spider’s web is a hand grenade.
But thanks to last session’s experiments, I think we know what to do here! Go catch the woodpecker, and:
>open cage
(releasing the woodpecker)
The woodpecker soars angrily out of the cage. With the kind of shock that would give weaker travellers cardiac arrest, the giant spider leaps off the web, giving it a mighty shake, dislodging the contents, attempting to snare the woodpecker, which only just flies straight up and out of its eightfold grasp. The spider looks malevolently at you but returns to the web.
And at last, we can:
>get grenade
The grenade must have been caught up in a particularly glutinous knot, because it’s now stuck to your hand.
Uh oh.
>drop grenade
The grenade is stuck to your hands!
Well this is less than ideal. Maybe the river will help?
>dip grenade in river
The polluted river, running with solvents, is just what you need to remove the spider’s glue from the grenade (although it does make your hand sting, rather).[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Props to the game for recognizing that phrasing—I didn’t actually expect that to work!
Remember one of the very first things we did in the game: blowing up the monument with our sparkler? I think it’s time to end the game by bookending that.
Northwest of Pyramid
Open field north of the canal, which opens out here to a steel-grey river and then flows under the eastern corner of the golden Pyramid. In the centre of the northwest face is a gleaming doorway.A crop of barley sways at waist height around you.
A tree-trunk making a log bridge spans the glacial canal.
The woodpecker sits disconsolately on the near end of the trunk, pecking now and then at the wood.
Up in the sky, you catch sight of crows flying south.
A silver fish leaps briefly out of the pure canal-water.
This is where the river flows under the pyramid. I think all we have to do is…
>pull pin
The pin is now irretrievably out of the grenade. Count to five and be somewhere else!
Five!
>put grenade in river
The hand grenade is washed away to the east by the fast canal waters.
Four!
>z
Time passes.Lantern-jawed frogs jump around the shallows of the icy canal.
Three!
>z
Time passes.Across the grassy fields, you catch sight of a giraffe in the long grass.
Two!
>z
Time passes.
One!
>z
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
The Land is shaken, over and over, by the reverberations of a distant explosion. The great golden Pyramid begins to melt and fuse, struggling as if alive but beginning to drip and fragment into the Ash River.
The apes run for cover, grandmother cradling the white rabbit in her arms, and you would imitate them, except that, with all Kaldecki’s equipment broken, your presence in this reality is weakening…
[Press SPACE to continue.]
4 Likes
Ough. Where are we now? At least this time we have a reason for this awful headache…
Epilogue - Century Park
Are we back? Did we make it?
Century Park
At one side of the great Park, on a gravel path which runs west to northeast beside poplar trees. Crowds of celebrants are enjoying themselves to the north, having abandoned the canvas marquee east, for today is January 1st, 1900. A table is set up northwest, surrounded by children in Victorian dress.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
One point? Does that mean—
You have so far scored 100 out of a possible 100, in 2714 turns, giving you the rank of Centurion.
100 out of 100!
>full
Your score is made up as follows:
- 38 points for opening the monument, revealing the board, lighting the board, entering the time vortex, meeting Black, triggering off World War One, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, sending a distress signal, passing on a secret diplomatic letter, ensuring safe passage of the letter, entering the Land, bringing mould to attention, dancing with Black, regaining “Le Temps Retrouve”, scheduling aviation, plugging the heater, impersonating an officer, disposing of the bomb, brushing through, shutting up Black, landing on the Moon, opening the cargo pod, programming Waldo, activating the ALSEP, putting out the engine fire, emergency refuelling, landing a B-29, finding RZ-ROV, rescuing Black, using the Enigma machine, decoding Black’s message, handcuffing Black to the railings, driving the Skoda, tying the barge-rope, paralysing East Berlin’s phones, escaping the Hotel, re-fusing the Suez crisis and acquiring the grenade;
- 16 points for recovering jigsaw pieces;
- 16 points for playing jigsaw pieces;
- 11 points for finding sundry items;
- 19 points for visiting various places;
which comes to a total of 100 out of 100, giving you the rank of Centurion.
History is saved!
But…what about us?
>n
Stick to the path for now. The party doesn’t seem all that enticing, and besides you’ve seen it all before.
Headaches are the worst.
If I remember right, west should be the monument…
>w
Where Lightning Struck
A corner of the Park, beside copses of trees and some fencing. Standing about here is the outdoor equivalent to always serving the lemonade at dances.The blasted remains of a great oak tree stands here, still faintly smoking. It must have been hit by a lightning strike in the night.
Where else can we go? I’ve always had a good feeling about southeast…
>se
There’s nothing behind the tent, this time.
Or northwest?
>nw
Among Children
You are among children in the Victorian dress you remember from illustrations of all the great children’s books you read as a child. They’re chattering, exchanging sketches, making daisy-chains and gazing at you with amused curiosity.The Reverend Toby, a genial man with a full white beard and side-burns, stands behind the table, offering encouragement and advice to the children, and marking the drawing competition.
The drawing competition, you say?
>x toby
You instinctively feel that he is exactly what he seems.>toby, hello
He can’t really hear you over the polite clamour of the children.>x children
The children laugh delicately but don’t really take any notice of you. For a moment, you catch sight of their drawing-boards - are they each carrying a jigsaw piece?
Ooh…the jigsaw pieces return.
>show sketchbook to toby
(first taking Emily’s sketch book)
Reverend Toby is unimpressed.
Boo. Let’s go explore other directions.
>ne
Churchyard
A neatly fenced and walled-off churchyard, whose well-kept graves are serene and dappled with the rich, variegated greens of the grass and hedges. The red-brick chapel (to the east) is still under construction.A night-jar flutters from perch to perch along an old iron fence.
Still a wonderful place to relax and wait out a migraine, even a hundred years in the past, before the chapel was finished.
What about that beer tent, that was east in 1999?
>e
Exhibition Tent
This morning, it was a popular exhibition; but now the visitors have dwindled, leaving just canvas walls and glass cases (all carefully padlocked).The canvas flutters slightly and you can just make out someone tantalisingly familiar rushing away.
Tantalizingly familiar you say?
Century Park
At one side of the great Park, on a gravel path which runs west to northeast beside poplar trees. Crowds of celebrants are enjoying themselves to the north, having abandoned the canvas marquee east, for today is January 1st, 1900. A table is set up northwest, surrounded by children in Victorian dress.Black sits here, aimlessly looking across the Park, obviously tired and depressed.
Our old friend!
>black, hello
“I don’t want to talk to you, thanks.”
Yeah, that’s…fair, honestly.
A bit more wandering around made me realize I’d used the wrong verb with Toby.
>give sketchbook to toby
He takes Emily’s sketch-book from you. “Really, you know, young Emily ought rightly to have come along herself for the competition… let’s see now…” He flicks through the pages. “Wonderful! A full complement of most exquisitely fine drawings… but, oh dear, rules are rules. I’m afraid she’s too late for the contest, but, oh, please accept a token prize for young Emily.” He takes the book for the forthcoming exhibition, and hands you a Teddy Bear.>x bear
A brand new fashion of toy for children, a stuffed brown bear, named Teddy after Theodore Roosevelt, the famous American hunter (who’s even now running for the Presidency).
At last the mystery is revealed. This is why we needed to sketch animals all throughout history: because without them, we couldn’t get this!
And why do we need it?
>give bear to black
Wordless and wise, you offer Black the Teddy Bear. For a dreadful second, Black looks on the point of declining… but then half-reluctantly smiles with something eventually begun. “Oh well,” says Black, getting briskly up off the grass and offering an arm. “Perhaps we’ll live to be a hundred yet.” And if you auction the icosahedral amethyst gem, it should be a comfortable life.Together you set out to live through the twentieth century and the journey of its strange and vivid days.
*** You have won ***
In that game you scored 100 out of a possible 100, in 2739 turns, with a score of 16/16 on the drawing game, giving you the rank of Centurion.
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
7 Likes
And we’ve reached the end!
As far as I can tell, the ending doesn’t change very much. If you don’t have the sketchbook, you just can’t finish the game—you’re left standing around in Century Park for the rest of your days. (You’re quite literally locked out at the last move of the game. There’s a reason I call this puzzle so unimaginably cruel!) If you aren’t holding the gem, the description is the same, but without the comment about a comfortable life.
But with 16/16 animals, and the gem, we’ve rekindled our relationship, and maybe we can start to patch things up with Black. Maybe they’ll eventually start to see things our way and realize this is how it had to end.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally get to learn their real name. (No promises though.)
23.sav (8.1 KB)
(This save file is at the start of Century Park.)
In the next few days, I’ll upload the complete collection of transcripts, saves, and maps. But for now I’m going to pause and simply bask for a moment in this achievement.
9 Likes
Ha! I almost used that quote from Four Quartets in RTE, but settled on a different one.
Thanks and congratulations on a fantastic playthrough!
3 Likes
This has been very fun to read! The land seemed much bigger when playing with just playthroughs.
I don’t remember when we got the gem. Where does that show up?
Congrats on a very entertaining let’s play. It’ll be fun to reread in the future.
4 Likes
If you rub the lead amulet (while wearing it) next to one of the Platonic solids in the corners of the land, you get a gem. The hint is that the amulet says “The Wealth of Plato” on it.
I wouldn’t have found it if I hadn’t been trying all sorts of bizarre actions while stuck on the oval rock puzzle.
3 Likes
Congratulations on a great playthrough! It was an experience so magical it managed to summon Graham for a few rounds of fascinating recollection. Thanks so much for sharing, and congratulations on all the solving.
4 Likes
Congratulations! Really enjoyed following along with this one.
3 Likes
This was wonderful. I really love these let’s plays. It was fantastic to read Graham’s comments about it, and I’ve learnt a think or 2 about the historical events.
It’s been a while since I played the game myself, but I think you can find out who Emily is if you ask questions. Or maybe I dreamt it.
I have a couple of suggestions for games I’d love to see future let’s plays of but I don’t think this thread is the place for them.
3 Likes
This was a fun thread!
Anyone else than me that felt that the business with the grenade at the end was a little homage to the babelfish-puzzle from Hitchhiker?
2 Likes
Congrats on the play through! I was silently following along since the start, and enjoyed every single post in this thread. Well done!
2 Likes
Thank you so much @Draconis for such an entertaining thread, and of course to @GrahamNelson for writing the game in the first place and for all your thoughts and reflections. I’ve really enjoyed reliving Jigsaw.
So what would everyone nominate as their favourite parts of the story? Best puzzle? The chances of Black and White having a successful relationship?!
And finally, if there is a sequel to Jigsaw sometime in the 2090s, which historical events from the first quarter of the century would you put into it?
2 Likes
So far there’s only 9/11 that I feel certain have wide enough repercussions to have a place in the sequel. It often takes a couple of years to see what really are historical events.
1 Like
I think we can all agree that the master-game puzzle in the Land came out to be too difficult, though it wouldn’t have taken much to clue it better. (In fairness, the appetite for hard IF was greater back then, and I don’t think Jigsaw is more difficult than, say, Spellbreaker.) I think it’s the case that you don’t actually need to complete the sketchbook, but that you need some threshold number of animals - I forget how many. Getting the whole lot was meant as a stretch goal for repeat players, of whom there were quite a few, back in the day. Still, I agree, the prologue should have done more to force you to find the sketchbook.
I’m in two minds about the Land. There had to be a big elaborate puzzle of some kind, in order to make the living Land interactive; and I think the apes are rather engaging. I love this little note, for example:
The apes run for cover, grandmother cradling the white rabbit in her arms, and you would imitate them, except…
But Jigsaw is a history, for all that it has fantastical elements, and this is just not tied closely enough to the great themes of the game. I had some idea of the Land as being not history but antihistory: since, really, an unchanging Eden is exactly the reverse of history, which is the story of disruption and change - like the demolition of the Kaldecki machine. Only people make history, not animals, and that is in some sense the difference between the two. But I don’t know that I communicated that very well. “A blue-behinded ape, I trip / Upon the trees of Paradise.”
The Century Park epilogue is the more satisfactory book-end, I would say. Mid-day, not midnight: New Year’s Day, not New Year’s Eve; the first day of the century, not the last. There’s some pleasingly low-key rewriting of the room descriptions: “always in the kitchen at parties” has become “always serving the lemonade at dances”, I see. The outcome means that our two central characters never leave the twentieth century, but instead have gone around one of the great loops described when you pass through the Kaldecki machinery. The romcom part of Jigsaw ends as undemonstratively as a Jane Austen novel - no kiss, I see - but I think it just about does enough, and after all people do behave demurely in public parks in 1900 when surrounded by children. I came to this playthrough thread with a certain amount of trepidation, but I come away from it a little bit proud of Jigsaw. It has the brash overconfidence of a quite young writer, but the thing works.
Emily Short tells me that she played through Jigsaw on the evening of 31 December 1999, so in her case Emily’s sketchbook really was Emily’s. But we didn’t know each other then. I had picked the name only because it had a pretty, Victorian ring to it but was not such a period piece that it would seem out of place at the far end of the century.
History is long, isn’t it? And yet we carry on living through it. I find it hard now to retrace the threads of memory which connect me with the author of this game, who spent hours in Oxford libraries with little piles of 10p pieces for the photocopiers, assembling all the fragmentary facts which appear in Jigsaw. (No Wikipedia then, and I had to visit a special building to collect my email. The game took several minutes to compile, even on a then-fast Acorn RISC PC, with that hot new invention, the ARM processor.) What would that Graham have thought about the history of the next thirty years? We are as distant from him now as he was from several of the vignettes in the story.
11 Likes
I agree with 9/11 as being historically significant, but also with soldiers toppling/encouraging the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, the subway bombing in Spain, the stuck Evergreen ship in the suez canal, the revival of Dr Who, justin timberlake and janet jackson at the superbowl creating the start of youtube, metallica’s lawsuit against Napster, the burning of Notre Dame cathedral.
3 Likes
There’s no shortage of candidates, but I’ll pick six:
Steve Jobs holding up the first iPhone at Moscone in 2007 - ubiquitous personal Internet, social media, selfies, globalisation of community. The 6 January 2021 insurrection - collapse of political norms, civil society crumbling, democracy in retreat around the world, the decline of America. A vignette in Hong Kong - last gasp of empires, the phenomenal rise of China, nationalism, indifference to “the rules-based world order”. Mid-point of the Harry Potter saga (2000) - reinvention of the Victorian/Edwardian children’s book as something reaching people all across the world, which no new book had done in many decades. Covid-19 in 2020 - flight from office work and out of the cities, global pandemic. And above all, climate change - if you’re only going to do one, that’s the one. Those graphs will be the truest history of the 21st century. But as it is happening everywhere and all of the time, hard to pin down to a time and place.
10 Likes