Thanks for the thoughtful retrospective, always enjoy stuff like this! Got around to reading it and had some thoughts, and they didn’t really end up like questions so it didn’t seem right for the other AMA thread.
1 – SEQUENCE
Oh, I guess I didn’t understand how the Rock worked. You’re right it’s clear certain attacks are effecting it, but I didn’t get that it was actually weakening it; what I thought I needed was a certain sequence of cumulative attacks to beat it, and not just ANY three attacks. Nor did I understand Wesley.
TOPIC PUZZLE DESIGN
You talked about using different approaches to vary topic-based puzzles. Which is great, though is four things enough to establish enough of a pattern to even need to vary things? And to combat lawn-mowering? I dunno, don’t players mostly resort to that if they get stuck, in which case, something else went awry? I think I just misread what the structure would be early, and I expected to mostly get variations on the same puzzle. Instead it breaks the pattern twice. Even if all 4 friends/bosses had just been solved in roughly the same basic way, I think it could’ve been just as satisfying, since “solve the other 3 first” isn’t particularly interesting, and I didn’t ever understand Wesley/Rock. In the “2 - Condition” section you said that the precondition for Sofia made more narrative sense to you so it might feel less arbitrary than getting stronger, but the obvious puzzle structure of 19 Once still made me desire more of a Thing to Solve there even if there was some story reasoning.
I think one thing (I mentioned this in my review) is the physical symmetry of the puzzle made my brain really itch for symmetrical solutions though. If the friends had been, say, numbered 1 2 3 4, and you move between them that way, I wouldn’t have expected a symmetrical puzzle structure quite as much and maybe it wouldn’t have been a problem then. And “solve the other 3 first” mapped to 4 might’ve felt a bit more like a final boss in Zugzwang, or the climax in a story about the friends, maybe? But the layout really effected my understanding of what was going on, I think!
The narrative question at the heart of 19 Once is “will these people manage to remain friends?”, or more broadly, “can teenage friendships stand the test of time?”.
My feeling is the give up ending is just so brief that I just didn’t think about it all that much. Watch party felt like a continuation of the story. Give up ends up like a early alternate ending, just like–racking my brain for an IF example–maybe like leaving the theatre early in So Far. The player will have seem the Zugzwang movie about how the pawn didn’t give up, even though the characters won’t have seen it yet, so what does it mean that Paige was able to give up then?
I like the idea though: using multiple endings to answer a central narrative question in different ways! A lot of the concern around players missing the meta stuff is because it’s spread across two games, but it if was just one game, then maybe it could go further?
Where’s the multiple endings thread I saw… Okay found it. The answers to “What Is the Point of Long-Form Multiple-Ending Works?” in another thread was generally along the lines of things like player agency/replayability/“your story”. Maybe one answer more along the lines of this idea is this:
Though I don’t know if there are visual novels that don’t have that “true ending” as part of it, because those still sort of give a final answer if you see it through, instead of leaving it up to the player to synthesize different endings into their own meaning. Maybe this sort of thing does work better with a true ending though.
It’d be interesting to see more games build a meta-story around multiple endings. Maybe in a way that feels, like this, more like following a breadcrumb trail.
…Trying to think of any IF that did anything like this before. Maybe 500 Apocalypses was a decent study in something more like this! …Repeat the Ending?