Putting a weird puzzle-idea out there

So, I was thinking. If you have to say a certain word (or odd command) in, say, a kitchen, but every time you enter the kitchen, you forget the word. And you have to use another method to do the action. How would you implement that? I mean, if you want to use that in a game, you are free to do so. Just send a link because I would like to see how you attempted the puzzle.

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Why not clarify your idea a bit more (describe a more concrete game-situation) and submit it as a seed to SeedComp?

SeedComp! - Planting Round - itch.io

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Well, I’m kind of putting the idea out there if anyone wants to shift it to their understanding. I made it purposefully vague.

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I mean I guess I’d prevent the player from saying the word while they were in the kitchen, until they wrote it down while they were in the living room then carried the note into the kitchen where they could read it aloud?

Interestingly, I had a version of this puzzle happen in real life: one year when I was in law school, I could never remember the word “paternalistic” - I mention I was in law school because it’s a concept that came up fairly regularly in classes on the justification for various rules. But for whatever reason - some very specific neurons must have died somehow? - it kept falling out of my head, even though I could remember stuff about the word, like it derived from the Latin word for “father” (which wasn’t enough for me to recall it since I’d just get hung up on thinking it was something to do with “patriarch” or “patriarchy” even though I knew that wasn’t right).

Finally I just realized I could remember it was written on like page 137 of one of my textbooks and flip to that whenever I couldn’t think of the word, which worked well enough until after about six months my brain figured out how to rewire itself so I could just remember “paternalistic” again. It was very odd!

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uhm… abstracting on why the word is forgotten in the kitchen, there’s nifty little things called “recorder”, since the earlier dictaphones (bulky things whose should be pushed around on a trolley à la Curses) to the modern cell phones thru the portable (and battery-powered…) audiocassette tape recorder, so, the core puzzle become recording outside the jinxed or whatever kitchen then playing the recorded word in the kitchen (and i give you enough hints on spicing up the puzzle… :wink: )

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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But then you just go to the kitchen. What you want is that when you enter the kitchen, you forget the word. How does that work?

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But if you forget the word, even though you haven’t, how you you record the word? Because if you know the word, couldn’t you just say the word in the kitchen?

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Wait, you mean you don’t start out forgetting the word, so the puzzle actually has two steps: 1) arrange things so you can’t remember the word once you get into the kitchen, and 2) nonetheless arrange things such that you can say the word in the kitchen? We’re really in magic/technobabble territory now but I guess for step one you’d take some kind of pill or do a targeted magnetic field stimulation of the brain or find a custom spell… or change tacks and say the whole game is one of those time-loop-plus-reset dealies so you need to stash the reminder of the word in the kitchen before you actually know it or something timey-wimey like that.

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Yup, exactly.
It’s very complicated (so much that I will probably never use it) so you can put it in your game if you want. Just send me a link to the game if you want.

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My first take on the idea was to assume there would be no way to bring any version of the actual word or phrase (recorded, written, etc.) into the kitchen with me. So the puzzle starting state is I’m in the kitchen and I know I’m supposed to say a code phrase, but I can’t know what that code phrase is. So essentially Outside Kitchen Me has to secretly tell Inside Kitchen Me what the code phrase is without actually sending any version of it in with me.

So maybe I’d disassemble the code phrase into parts, and bring in things that represent those parts, basically making a rebus?

For instance, perhaps in other rooms I can find: a pen, a mirror, a pair of small drums, a speech balloon (hey, I’m just brainstorming here, maybe I can cut it out of a cartoon or something), and a no drugs sign that has one of the “no” symbols crossing out a bong. I’d break apart the pair of drums, discard one of them, and stick the no drugs sign on the one I keep. Then I bring all that into the kitchen with me, so I have:

(drum + no drugs sign) + pen + speech balloon + mirror
(bongo + (no bong)) + pen + (speaking or talking) + (image of myself)
(o) + (pen) + (says) + (me)
“open sesame”

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Semi-related, in the game Ad Verbum, there are four rooms where you can only use words that start with a single letter, corresponding to the compass directions N,E,S, and W. The hardest part of each room is leaving. E is easy to leave, but leaving the N room was one of the hardest puzzles in the game for me!

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Oh I love that puzzle! Funnily, I got the N solution instantly and the W one very quickly as well, but was stuck on S forever. That’s a frequent challenge with those kinds of puzzles, I think - they can be all-or-nothing.

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The north one is the only one I remember the solution to at this point—trying to solve it stuck it in my head much more than the others!

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At one point I was going to do a game called “Hunt the Verb”… specifically aimed at all the people who moan about that aspect of old-school text adventures. :slight_smile: A variation on that theme would involve synonyms… where once you use up a synonym for a verb you have to come up with another one.

I actually have a variation of the OP’s puzzle-idea in an unfinished game design… but in that one it’s more a case of someone else forgetting words, rather than the player.

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Hmm… Interesting.

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