Enigmart
Sarah Willson
When I first played IF, a pen and paper were common accoutrements for the process: for drawing maps, for writing down clues, for listing places where I was stuck. As time and design sensibilities for IF games have moved on, that’s gone away: maps are tighter, and I usually try to keep the whole thing in my head at once. Larger maps often come with a map.png file, or the design makes it possible to think of areas of maybe 5-ish rooms as ‘chunked’, so you can think about ‘the house’ and ‘the forest’ and still keep things in your head.
Enigmart gave me a whole new reason to break out the pencil and paper again: it contains a bunch of word puzzles (think GAMES magazine, if you know what that is) where you really need to keep track of your thinking and progress as you go, and the best way to do that is… to write it down.
Now, with enough coding chops, at least some of these puzzles could have been given an entirely-computational interface: let you drag and drop state abbreviations into blanks, say, or let you rearrange letters in a box until the unscrambled word appeared. And it might have been nice? And to be fair, for several of the puzzles, the provided interface was sufficient. And sometimes I turned to a text editor instead of paper… But in the end, it would have been a ton of work, and the result would be an interface that only mildly improved or approximated Just Writing Stuff Down, and I appreciated the chance to step into manual mode, as it were.
The potential pitfall of the approach is that when I’ve moved to paper or a text editor, I’ve taken a step back from the game itself, to solve things in a ‘different space’, and that serves to distance me from the protagonist and the story of the game. And if the game had been heavily story-driven, I think the constant code-shifting would have served to mess up the story too much, with the constant flipping between ‘solving puzzles’ and ‘being the protagonist’. In a sense, Sarah has gone all-in on the ‘soup cans’ puzzle motif (despite giving the puzzles an in-universe reason to exist), which wouldn’t have worked as well in a story-driven game, but which worked fine for the game as written.
So much for the interface! How were the puzzles themselves? For me, pretty solid! I solved over half (maybe 3/4?) on my own, solved enough of a handful more to skip ahead to the answer without literally solving each bit, brute forced my way past a couple others, and finally used the built-in hints to get me thinking in the right direction for the final 3-5.
The huge glaring exception to this was the opening puzzle, which blocks access to the entire rest of the game. I stared at that thing, and had way too many ideas for how it might be solved, and thus found myself unable to eliminate any of them. Some of the words are homophones; does that help? (no.) They’re for ‘MagiMuffins’, maybe I’m supposed to remove a final letter? Remove a middle letter? Remove a c? Add a c? Combine two words? Split up the words? Finally, I dug up Josh’s review, which said ‘there’s actually a way to get a hint; here’s the hint’, and that hint was enough for me to instantly twig to the solution.
The problem here is feedback: there’s no iterative way to get closer to the solution; you either get it or you don’t. It’s an inherent failure mode of the genre: for many puzzles like this, there are no partial solutions, or steps you can take that let you know you’re on the right track. The other puzzle that felt this way for me was the true/false quiz. You’re told the answers are ‘easy’ if you ‘think outside the box’. Reader: there are so, so many possible boxes. I could not even begin to start to winnow down the field. Instead, I just brute-forced it: three of the trivia questions you can look up, and three are in-universe ‘facts’ you can’t, but that means there’s only 8 options for the three you don’t know, so I just tried them until I got it right. Again: there’s no feedback mechanism to let you know you’re close or far away from the right answer, and the universe of possible ways to encode a binary signal in a single question was entirely too large for me to try to sort through them all. Though as I write this, I’m realizing I could have looked for differences in the three lookupable questions? Anyway.
The story is light and kind of cute, and unless I’m very much mistaken, kind of autobiographical: a major NPC in the game just likes creating puzzles, and is blindsided when a corporation commodifies them. Can’t we all just create puzzles for each other without wondering what the value proposition is? And happily, the answer is of course ‘yes’ because IF in general is just people sharing stories and puzzles with each other. Group hug, everyone.
Did the author have anything to say? ‘Sharing puzzles is the best,’ and ‘Don’t let The Man get you down.’
Did I have something to do? Solve puzzles! On Actual Paper!
