Let's Play: Jigsaw

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@Kara_Louise

It was fantastic to read Graham’s comments about it, and I’ve learnt a think or 2 about the historical events.

Agreed on both counts!

@Kara_Louise

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 wasn’t able to get Toby to respond to anything except giving the sketchbook—all the clamoring children make it too hard for him to hear you. But that might just be a default response if you ask about things that aren’t implemented, instead of blocking conversation entirely.

@Kara_Louise

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.

Feel free! I’m considering playing one of the big influences on Jigsaw next—either Trinity (its direct inspiration), Curses (the author’s previous big game), or Acheton (the foundation of the “British mathematicians writing difficult adventures” genre). Or maybe it would be better to switch to a different genre entirely.

@heasm66

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?

I didn’t make the connection at the time, but yes, absolutely.

@Wynter

So what would everyone nominate as their favourite parts of the story? Best puzzle? The chances of Black and White having a successful relationship?!

For me, it would have to be the Enigma machine puzzle. The satisfaction of seeing mostly-sensible text come out of the Enigma was unmatched.

@Wynter

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?

The pandemic is the main one that comes to mind. There were definitely some enormous technological and political changes before that, like 9/11 and the internet exploding in popularity, but I was too young to really know what the world looked like before that.

@GrahamNelson

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.

Ahh. This makes sense to me in hindsight but I didn’t at all pick up on it at the time. The symbolism of all the different aspects of history (Art, Science, War, Politics), the river of time, Kaldecki corrupting and ruining it, all of that made sense to me, but I didn’t realize what the animals in the Living Land were meant to represent.

@GrahamNelson

The Century Park epilogue is the more satisfactory book-end, I would say.

I would also agree with this.

@GrahamNelson

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.

That is a truly beautiful coincidence!

[Wynter]

@GrahamNelson

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.

Agreed.

I think my favourite chapter overall was the Titanic one: largish map, beautifully-described, interesting NPCs; the progress of the disaster as it happens around you is so perfectly written timed. And you get to rearrange the deckchairs, which I loved.

I also liked the Proust chapter, and the way that the main puzzles are solved by going into dreams and memories - the dance with Black, the childhood memory of coming to understand what time really means.

Giving a cheesecake to Shostakovich was so delightfully random.

The Enigma puzzle was so well written, and I liked the way that that chapter was ‘split’ (at the time I didn’t pick up on the fact that the piece was damaged in the Wrights’ fire). Once I’d read this thread, it all became so much easier - I’m wondering if I just didn’t pick up on the fact that some of the steckers weren’t used. It was a while ago now.

I liked the unconventionality of the romance, and how you seem to be intrigued by and infuriated by each other. I liked the way that the two genders are never quite made explicit - for a while, I was convinced by the argument in Bonni Mierzejewka’s walkthrough, that White is male and Black is female, but this thread has changed my mind, as it has made me realise how many times we are told “the disguise isn’t quite convincing” or “the photograph is very bad, so it could be of you”, suggesting that we could have a cross-dressing heroine or two here.

I like to think that Black and White live a long and happy life through most of the twentieth century, although I suspect they will have a lot of spirited disagreements along the way.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@Wynter

I like to think that Black and White live a long and happy life through most of the twentieth century, although I suspect they will have a lot of spirited disagreements along the way.

I like Mike’s argument that in Black’s original timeline—the one where the Apollo astronauts died on the moon—Stalin made it through Finland and steamrolled Germany fairly quickly, eventually taking most of western Europe. Which explains why Black was trying to help the Nazis: they think anyone being able to stand up to Russia will lead to a better outcome, and then the Allies will probably be able to take out Germany before any horrible atrocities happen, right?

In which case, if we’re still in the “canonical” timeline at the end, they’re probably going to be utterly horrified to see what the Nazis end up doing.

(Or maybe we aren’t in the canonical timeline any more, and the pair are about to see what happens to 20th-century history without either of them meddling…)

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I was thinking of doing Trinity when Gold Machine gets there, but it’s fine if you do it Daniel. I’m only saying so to say, if you don’t do it, I’ve got it covered.

[P-Tux7]

For my part, I’m really interested in “Curses” or “Perdition’s Flames”.

This has been an excellent walkthrough and I enjoy the author commentary as well.

Something I really enjoyed in this last chapter is how Black simultaneously hates you and yet has a weird kinship with you, since you two are the only two people who’d really understand each other.

If I may ask Graham Nelson a question, where did the idea of White and Black being gender-neutral come from? This seems to be one of the first games I can think of that tries to have an actual gender-neutral protagonist (as opposed to how Drew pointed out that Zork has a gender-neutral protagonist until it’s convenient for the story for them to be male)… and the only other game of the decade I can think of is the educational “Super Solvers” series. This game pre-dates Undertale or Dominique Pamplemousse by about 20 years. I also have to agree with Andrew Plotkin’s assessment in that it seems that people ultimately project the genders of themselves and who they like onto the two characters. One interesting historical note I would like to add is that 75% of the Bletchley Park codebreakers were women.

So what is Black trying to prevent in the penicillin episode? I want to try to see if I can screw up history in that chapter but I’m not sure what would count as a “failure state”.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@P-Tux7

So what is Black trying to prevent in the penicillin episode? I want to try to see if I can screw up history in that chapter but I’m not sure what would count as a “failure state”.

Fleming’s discovery was largely ignored for over a decade afterward, until other scientists (Florey, Chain, Heatley, et al) picked it up and found ways to actually extract it and test it in animals. I believe Black wanted these other scientists to be the ones who discovered it in the first place, so that penicillin would exist a decade earlier and save more lives.

I haven’t found a way to actually fail this vignette—you can always go back and try again.

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

@P-Tux7

This game pre-dates Undertale or Dominique Pamplemousse by about 20 years.

I don’t think a gender-neutral (unspecified, project-what-you-want) protagonist is the same as a nonbinary protagonist, which Dominique Pamplemousse is.

[GrahamNelson]

If I may ask Graham Nelson a question, where did the idea of White and Black being gender-neutral come from?

From my mother, in a manner of speaking. She recommended to me the four detective novels by the lawyer Sarah Caudwell, whose sleuth and narrator, a professor of law called Hilary Tamar, is never given a gender. This is elegantly done, so that you can read the books casually and never quite notice - you simply make whatever assumption about the name “Hilary” (or about professors) that you would ordinarily make, and go from there. Because Hilary is the narrator, there is never a point where the text of the novel has to describe his/her appearance.

Caudwell wrote in the 1980s, and her Wikipedia page says this about her “personal life”:

She was a lifelong pipe-smoker, and inveterate crossword solver, reaching the final of The Times Crossword Competition more than once. For many years, she lived in Barnes, London, with her mother and aunt

She was an alumna of what is now my college in Oxford, though in her day it was a women’s college. She cross-dressed in order to get into the Union debating chamber, which was then men only. Her mysteries are entertainments more than they are novels, perhaps, but her prose is elegant and she has the engaging cynicism of the truly professional lawyer. The Sirens Sang of Murder, for example, contains this faux-footnote:

The Guide to Comfortable Tax Planning, which contains much invaluable advice on such questions as where to stay in Vaduz, eat in Gibraltar, or buy a novel in the British Virgin Islands, which flights to Luxembourg offer free champagne, what to see in Nassau, do in Vanuatu, wear in Panama, drink in the Netherlands Antilles, and on no account do in the Turks and Caicos, is unfortunately not available to the general public… I have the kind permission of the editors, however, to quote those passages which may be of assistance to my readers in connection with my present narrative.

I thought I’d borrow Caudwell’s trick, but go one further by making both protagonists of Jigsaw invisibly non-gendered, and not just the narrator. I now realise that Caudwell may have been making a statement, but I wasn’t, or not much of one. It just seemed a neat device.

But it turned out to mean a lot to two categories of players. There were those who felt marginalised from romantic fiction because of its uniformly boy-meets-girl template, and some of those people wrote me actual letters of thanks. And then there were those who realised what I was doing only halfway through Jigsaw and then suddenly realised how disgusting it was, like I’d catfished them into having some appalling same-sex relationship. Merely the potential of being in danger of accidentally kissing another man was unacceptable. Indeed, the idea that other people might do that was unacceptable, too. What can I say? It was the twentieth century.

[GrahamNelson]

Oh yes, and Wikipedia says that Caudwell was also Michael Flanders’s sister-in-law and Olivia Wilde’s aunt, impossible as that combination is to imagine.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

And on that note, now that we’ve reached the end of the playthrough, here’s something I’m curious about.

How did everyone imagine Black and White during this playthrough?

• White is a man, Black is a woman
• White is a woman, Black is a man
• They’re both men
• They’re both women
• Other

Personally, I’m in the “Other” category: my mental image fluctuated over the course of the game, sometimes imagining them more masculine, sometimes more feminine. I was (very pleasantly) surprised how little the game specified about them. Various reviews I’d read had made a point that White had to be male and Black female, because of the codebreaking portion and going undercover as a honeymooning couple, but the game goes out of its way to make it clear that one or both of you is skilled at disguising their gender as needed. (You all saw me miss this completely during the codebreaking part, but the text is explicit that you’re putting on a disguise that hides your face. That’s on me.)

[heasm66 (Henrik Åsman)]

As a cis man I imagined white=man, black=woman, unfortunately. I’m boring like that…

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

I misclicked on White=man, black=woman, meant to click “both men”

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I projected my own identity upon the pair, and did so without a hitch. I remember being surprised at realizing that the game did not specify the genders of the two agonists. Surprised and impressed, in fact.

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

If you click “show vote” you should be able to change it!

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. A mass of files! For each section, here’s my map, the Trizbort file for the map, and a save file when arriving there.

Green outlines indicate where you start; red outlines indicate where the disturbed air appears, if I found it in play.

A1

a1.json (2.7 KB)
a1.sav (1.7 KB)

A2

a2.json (1.2 KB)
a2.sav (2.4 KB)

A3

a3.json (9.3 KB)
a3.sav (7.6 KB)

A4

a4.json (7.2 KB)
(No save for this one, it’s the start of the game)

B1

b1.json (6.0 KB)
b1.sav (1.7 KB)

B2

b2.json (6.9 KB)
b2.sav (2.0 KB)

B3

b3.json (6.5 KB)
b3.sav (6.7 KB)

B4

b4.json (6.7 KB)
b4.sav (2.3 KB)

C1

c1.json (9.1 KB)
c1.sav (1.1 KB)

C2

c2.json (1.2 KB)
c2.sav (1008 Bytes)

C3

c3.json (5.3 KB)
c3.sav (2.1 KB)

C4

c4.json (7.9 KB)
c4.sav (2.5 KB)

D1

d1.json (3.9 KB)
d1.sav (7.8 KB)

D2

d2.json (4.4 KB)
d2.sav (7.4 KB)

D3

d3.json (2.2 KB)
d3.sav (7.1 KB)

D3, Version 2

d3_2.json (2.7 KB)
d3_2.sav (7.3 KB)

D4

For some reason, Trizbort doesn’t export this one as a working image, so you get a screenshot.

d4.json (3.5 KB)
d4.sav (7.9 KB)

The Land

land.json (5.2 KB)
(Saves here at various points can be found in the thread.)

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

And a truly enormous transcript file, in case anyone wants to dig out any particular messages:

complete.txt (1.2 MB)

[Kara_Louise (Kara Goldfinch)]

Possible Endgame Spoilers

It’s been a while since I played the game, but can you talk to black in the epilogue or show them the sketchbook? Either you find out by doing one of those that Black is Emily or I imagined it.

I put the spoilers in a details tag because until they fix it, the spoilers thing is a pain to read with a screen reader
As for future Let’s plays, I’d love someone to attempt one of Andy Philips’ notoriously difficult games like Time All Things come To An End, Heroin’s Mantle or Inside Woman. Inside Woman’s probably a bit easier and there’s an invisiclues file for it, which I used a lot when I played it.

[evouga]

@Wynter

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?

What’s interesting about the Jigsaw framing device is that it’s not sufficient to pinpoint key historical events: they also need to be bifurcations in the progression of the 21st century where a small intervention by Black could have had profound impact.

One can certainly imagine Black thwarting the 9/11 attacks, for instance; they could have also rescued George Floyd and nipped the spread of COVID-19 in the bud in Wuhan.

It’s less clear what Black could have done to sabotage the rise of social media (distract The Zuck during his Harvard days?), or to prevent global warming(!)… the seeds of inevitable catastrophic climate change were sown in the 20th century, IMO.

[evouga]

As for the next Let’s Play, I’d enjoy one of Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, if only for the step-by-step explication of all of the allusions I’m too uncultured to understand.

[P-Tux7]

Thanks for the reply, Graham. I loved the anecdote about your mum and Caudwell’s cross-dressing. Those debaters must not have been as smart as they’d like to think they (or all men) are if they were fooled by that…

I didn’t really imagine anything. I guess since I wasn’t playing I didn’t really self-insert into White’s role - not that >ASSASSINATE ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND really feels like something I’d do. I’d likely lack the nerve at the crucial moment. I… admittedly imagined the two characters as the spies from the MAD Magazine comic “Spy vs. Spy”, since that’s what they pretty much are here. I’d also like to point out that any arguments about disguises or whatnot are rendered kind of moot by the fact that Black is apparently skilled enough to obtain/build and launch their own lunar module onto the moon. When you’re that sufficiently-motivated, a disguise is small potatoes.

These bozos