I just started trying [EDIT: that is, I’m about a hundred attempts in] Rematch by Andrew Pontious (thanks to Emily Short’s post today and I feel like I’ve made lots of progress but I’m not there yet.
In general, I can get Ines to try doing things.
It looks like the thing I need to exploit is the wobbly ceiling fan.
And that a capacity someone has that would be useful is that Ines is good at throwing things.
But I feel as though I haven’t hit the right tool for the job. Ines’s stick seems thoroughly hinted as throwable, as does the tennis ball, but neither reaches the fan.
I’ve thought that maybe Ines can get height by climbing on our table then throwing the stick, but she’s embarrassed.
I’ve also tried figuring out the southwest table that is going to mishear the order to gather their equipment and having Ines go climb on that, but it’s too far away.
Is any of that on the right track? And if anyone has a suggestion as to how I can find information that’s useful, I’d much prefer that to a direct nudge.
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Oh wow, Rematch! Did that make my top 20? I’ll have to read Emily’s post later.
Off hand, you’re on the right track! Pay attention to what’s happening around you every turn. That might be too vague? The solution involves putting together a bunch of background details, and figuring out cause and effect. It might be more elaborate than you think. Keep in mind things that seem really deeply implemented.
I thought Rematch was partly interesting b/c of the emotional gap between what’s happening and what you’re doing. What’s happening is actually pretty vicious, but all that sort of fades as you get sucked into the nuts and bolts mechanics of the puzzle.
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Hmm… does the solution involve the controls? Like getting the people at the southwest table to whack the controls, perhaps by incapacitating the colleague who restrains them?
One thing I’m not liking about this is the cyclical aspect.
Specifically, If I have to do something with the southwest table, I have to go southwest to see which table is relevant–since that ends the game, I can’t do anything with that knowledge for eight more turns. And if I try something and fail, the scrollback which tells me which table is relevant is nine iterations farther back. So I’ve had to switch back and forth to a notetaking app to write down the combinations, and I’m not really sure what this adds over just keeping everything the same.
Okay, so from what I remember…
You don’t need to incapacitate them… You just don’t want them to interfere.
There’s someone else that’s important elsewhere.
You only need to know what’s happening at the other locations, but you shouldn’t need to keep visiting them to try stuff.
The solution involves the cycle, but you should focus on all the other steps beforehand.
Don’t ignore your friends!
The solution is a very involved action, involving you knowing every cause/effect there. It might actually be harder now that parser conventions have solidified? Especially around conversations. You need to know what counts as a “single action” which isn’t necessarily intuitive.
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You’re on the right track but you gotta keep in mind that this is a one-move game.
For Rematch it means that every person has a single action. You can’t do something, get something and then use it, you can’t make someone do something and then make them do some other thing. One move only.
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This is still pretty confusing to me.
As far as operating on multiple other people, I can whisper to Nick to dare Ines to do something but I’m not quite sure how to involve other people in the chain, or more than one aside from whoever Ines throws something at. Is that the thing about there being a complex notion of what counts as a single action that isn’t obvious?
The thing about repeatedly visiting other locations was just about finding out which table was almost whacking the control panel for any given table I start at.
I feel like I’ve pretty much stopped getting useful feedback from my actions. I’ve discovered the boyfriend but my attempts at interaction have failed:
Summary
whisper to nick to dare ines to throw the javelin at the boyfriend
Which javelin do you mean, Ines’s cuestick, or your cuestick?
ines’s
…Ines hurls it with Olympic abandon at the boyfriend wearing a Mets cap. It hits him in the back, piercing clothing and skin — a direct hit! The counter girl cries out and points at her.
On the loudspeaker over Barenaked Ladies’s latest hit, you hear a girl’s voice drone, “Table 7, table 7, your time is up, please bring your equipment to the counter.”…
That doesn’t really seem right?
I took a look at the solution to refresh my memory.
You’re basically there!
You got fan > control panel > people hit wall. You need to keep following the chain downwards.
Why do they want to hit the wall? What’s preventing them?
The boyfriend is literally a distraction. He’s not your target.
You know how to get items thrown at people. The javelin isn’t what you want. I have no idea how I got this back then, so here, part of the solution’s syntax is gonna be “throw xxxx with xxx”.
Lemme know if you just want specific tips.
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Ooh I found a trick for delineating some possibilities:
>whisper to nick to dare ines to throw 8 ball at person
Which person do you mean, you, Nick, the accomplice, the loudmouth, the boyfriend wearing a Knicks cap, the people to the northwest, the people to the north, the people to the northeast, the people to the west, the people to the east, the people to the southwest, the people to the southeast, or the teenaged couple?
I’m not actually sure this is getting me closer to the solution, but I feel pretty proud of having thought of that.
(Thanks for the comments! dgtzeia, I’ve read yours and that last bit was helpful. Oreolek, I haven’t read yours yet because I want to explore a little more, but it is appreciated!)
OK, so having broken open Oreolek’s hint, and having figured out some more of what’s around by whispering to Nick to dare Ines to search the backpack–earlier I’d tried “open” but that didn’t work
I can now
get a page of the calendar wrapped around a pool ball and thrown somewhere.
But I’m still not there? I can’t figure out a way to
refer to the people at the pool table, and targeting the pool table itself does nothing. Also I can’t grasp the logic of why wrapping a page around something might help.
Oh hey I got it!
The thing was to figure out who was reacting to the cartoon, though I got sidetracked by the title of the cartoon rather than the number.
Also I didn’t really pick up on the fact that the loudmouth was close enough to the counter that the girl would hear him.
…oooh, I had really missed a clue, that the loudmouth’s random blather always contains a number, and this is the table the girl calls. That really sidetracked me. I thought that table’s time was really up. A thing that’s distracting here is that the number the girl calls really doesn’t have anything to do with the number you’re supposed to target.
Hmm, missed opportunity: If you throw the tennis ball at the loudmouth, shouldn’t he read the number off the ball? Wilson 3 or whatever?
The solution I was trying to get to was distracting the colleague at the table so they don’t dissuade the other person from whacking the control panel.
Re: the syntax hint
Yeah, I tried something like “whisper to nick to dare ines to wrap the page around the ball and throw it” at least once even after you explained the format to me! (And I wouldn’t have known to try that if you hadn’t explained the format.
Re: the last hint–I did catch that you were giving me a hint, but I wasn’t able to translate it into gameplay terms.
At one point I was hoping that I could do something that would somehow get the boyfriend out of the way so Ines could get a clear shot at the girl and confuse her into announcing the wrong number… I didn’t realize she was already confused into announcing the wrong number.
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