Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey (Andrew Schultz)
Played on: 29th October (2nd October update played)
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Frotz
How long I spent: 2 hours to almost-but-not-quite finish the game (scoring 70/75-84)
(Full disclosure: I tested Andrew Schultz’s other IFComp entry, Zero Chance of Recovery, and he’s tested my current project. But I’ve had nothing to do with this entry.)
Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey, hereafter referred to as LLJJ for my own sake, is a wordplay puzzle game controlled by text parser. It’s a continuation of the puzzle types used in the author’s previous games Very Vile Fairy File and Quite Queer Night Near, though I haven’t played those and can’t compare this game to them. The ballot says it’s 90 minutes long, but I don’t think that’s enough – I couldn’t quite finish it in the 2-hour IFComp judging limit even using as many hints as I dared.
The puzzle gimmick is all about alliterative rhymes, as demonstrated in the game titles. You’ll be confronted with a person or object or concept with an alliterative name; your job is to come up with new phrases that change the initial phoneme but keep the rest of the sounds of each word, in order to create another object or change of state that solves the problem. For example (and I think I’m inventing a puzzle here, but my apologies if I’m accidentally spoiling a puzzle in VVFF or QQNN), you might meet a character in a car experiencing road rage, so you might try trying things like “code cage” or “goad gauge” to see if something like a cage or an instrument can address the problem. (Usually only one or two phrases will be the expected solution, but something in the game’s descriptions will clue the right phrase.) The experience of this game is sitting in front of your computer saying out loud things like “blowed blage? Mowed mage? Throwed frage?” trying to work out what actually sounds like words.
Anybody who has every talked to anybody from a different town will spot a problem here: everybody has an accent and everybody thinks their accent is the right one. One person’s homophone is another person’s who-in-their-right-mind-would-ever-think-these-words-sound-the-same. And, well, yes. This is one of the big stumbling blocks to solving the puzzles in LLJJ. Schultz leans into it with a liberal interpretation of sounds, meaning you have to be very flexible here. To take an example from one of those game titles, you may find that the “er” in “very” is considered a match for the “air” in “fairy”. Some people won’t have a problem with this, but others might say them slightly differently (I know I do – I draw the “air” out more than I do with the “er”) so they might miss rhymes like this when trying to solve puzzles. I’ll bet there’s a puzzle in here to stymie every English speaker on the globe.
Because of this, LLJJ has the potential to be a really nasty wordplay game with lots of reading the author’s mind (as well as guessing their accent). But it’s not. LLJJ is a remarkably kind game. There’s a saying in cryptic crosswords which I can’t find an attribution for, but which I’d say applies to puzzles in general: the role of the setter is to lose gracefully. You want the solver to beat you, even if you want it to be a challenge. If you fancy yourself the Riddler and make the most obtuse puzzle you can, the prospective solvers will mostly get fed up and leave and you’ll rob yourself of the satisfaction of seeing people admire your brilliant solution.
LLJJ wants you to solve it. It’s one of the best-hinted games I’ve played. All the puzzles have clues embedded in their descriptions. A close-but-wrong guess may give you an extra clue. If you get a phrase which will solve a future puzzle but not this one, LLJJ kindly stores it in a list for you to check later, removing the possibility of guessing a solution too early and then never trying it again. There’s even a SOUNDS verb that lists common phonemes, for those of us who need to stare at our keyboards going “soad sage? Doad dage? Foad fage?..” The puzzles themselves are consistent and fair, and deviations from the norm are usually indicated clearly. The only puzzles which upset me were the ones where I’d never heard of the necessary word, but that’s just one of the perils of a wordplay game. I tried a cryptic crossword the other day which threw up the word “enfilade”. This kind of thing just happens sometimes.
In-game objects also provide excellent hinting, although it takes a bit of work to figure them out. The leet learner object provides a lot of settings for nudges if you get close to the right answer – you can switch those off, but I think they’re best left on to overcome any accent/spelling trouble. It can also provide numbers after each guess – what those numbers mean is left as an exercise to the solver, but I think this concept is introduced in a bad and intimidating way, encouraging you to climb to a particular place and then bombarding you with obscure edge-case numbers you’re not going to be able to make head-or-tail of yet.
As well as the leet learner, you can also obtain an object which solves critical-path puzzles for you, but which only holds a limited set of charges. In a clever bit of design, it’s recharged by finding good-but-wrong solutions. Even if “code cage” isn’t useful, if it’s recognised by the game, it contributes a little something to your progress. This encourages you to keep trying puzzles honestly without resorting to skipping them too early, since if you struggle for long enough making valid guesses, you’ll earn the right to skip them. (LLJJ also counts the number of valid rhymes you’ve found for each puzzle; if you’re motivated by seeing numbers go up, LLJJ’s got you covered.)
I spent a lot of time talking about the puzzles because that’s the draw here. It’s one of those games where the story and setting is just there to spice up the puzzles. In LLJJ’s case, as with a lot of Schultz’s other wordplay games, it seems like the puzzles came first and were arranged roughly thematically, and then the locations and storyline were bent around them. This is not a complaint, of course – it’s very clear from the outset that LLJJ is not trying to be a heavily story-based game. The inciting incident is that the player character has nothing better to do and just decides to go along with the wordplay adventure. Having said this, the puzzle-first writing does happen to lead to some little scenes which are a lot of fun to build up. My favourite of these was the sequence where an arena concert is built up from scratch. These word puzzles are surprisingly flexible!
One last thing to note is that LLJJ is kind of a buggy game, but not in a game-breaking way as far as I know. The bugs are mostly in the way it displays text. There’s a hub area whose list of locations is wrong, running two locations together on one line; since the list is initially presented as a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle, this makes those blanks unintentionally tricky to fill in. There are one or two spots where the response to the solution I found felt disjointed, as if I had missed a step (e.g. (puzzle solution spoiler here) the Mad-Most-Cad Coast, which suddenly mentioned a voice when I correctly guessed Bad Boast, even though one wasn’t mentioned in that room when I entered). There are also a couple of valid (in my opinion – it could be an accent thing again) rhymes which aren’t recognised, but that’s okay, most have been caught and the ones that haven’t might be hoovered up in a post-comp release.
LLJJ came along at the right time for me. After a couple of games on deep themes and heavy topics, I was happy to just have a ton of word puzzles to work on. This is not an ambitious game, but it is a lot of fun and it’s on the pile of games I’ve got to finish off as soon as I’m done judging.