So, I thought I’d write a small guide.
How to play the game?
You’ll need an Atari interpreter. The blurb suggests Stella, and this worked for me.
Okay, but how to actually play the game
This can be confusing at first. You need the arrow keys and the space bar. Hold an arrow key down then press the space bar to move in that direction. So if you hold down the left-arrow and then press the space bar, you will move west. (Or get an error message.)
If you press space without the arrow key, you LOOK. This gives an alternate room description. What’s more, you can now use the left and right keys to choose other actions: USE (an item), TAKE (something that is here), TALK (with a person), and ACT (which you cannot do yet).
It takes some getting used to, but after a while navigation became quite quick for me. However, choosing an action seems finnicky – pressing a key once sometimes registers as two or zero presses, and you may end up choosing something you didn’t want.
As far as I know, the game cannot be put into an unwinnable state.
Save and Restore
Turns out you can use F9 and F11 to save and restore. This is not a game feature, but a Stella feature. Only useful if you will turn off your PC; you don’t need to keep saves otherwise, since the game cannot be put into an unwinnable state.
Hints
So, you walked into every direction and found all the rooms. But what to do in every room? I’ve got you covered.
- Paradox Errors - Nothing at all
- Dark cave (Plato’s Cave?) - 1. Pick up the razor. 2. The west wall doesn’t exist. You need to prove (its?) existence. 3. That would be Descartes and his cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. (As a philosophy nerd, I’d like to point out that his mature statement is ‘I think, I exist’.) 4. Use the ergo. This opens a bonus room, not needed.
- Kennel (Schrödinger’s Cat) - 1. Use and item. 2. Use the crate.
- Relativity (Twin paradox et cetera) - Talk to Einstein
- Mary’s room (Mary the Colour-Blind Colour Scientist). Use the black swan.
- Library (Zeno’s race track?) - Talk to Zeno, take bow.
- Thinking Sauna - Take ergo.
- Chinese Room (Searle’s Chinese Room) - You can use Swan and Crate to speed up the room, but I’m not sure this does anything?
- Forking Paths (Borges?) - There’s a fork in the road. You take the fork.
- Swamp (Problems of Induction) - Take black swan.
- Archery Range - Use bow, after the telescope has been solved.
- Telescope - Use razor, after relativity has been solved
- The gap - Bridged by what you do in another room
- Sea - Use fork
- Driftwood - Take plank
- Ship of Theseus (Famous puzzle about identity and persistence) - Use plank
- Entropy Lab (Second Law of Thermodynamics) - Take demon
- Quantum Lab (Schrödinger’s Cat) - Use crate, after using it elsewhere
- XOR Gate (XOR means ‘either the first, or the second, but not both’) - Use swan (the swan is not black or white, but black xor white)
- OR Gate (OR means ‘either the first, or the second, or both’) - Use crate (after using it in two other rooms, the cat presumably being dead, alive, and both at the same time)
- Entropy Gate - Use demon. Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment about a tiny being who can separate fast from slow molecules
- Tesser - TesserACT
