The Sub Rosa Retrospective is complete. It was a bit longer than it strictly needed to be, but I now feel confident in having said everything I was ever going to say about the game. If you don’t intend on playing the game, you still might find the part on cut puzzles amusing.
1 - Plans & Work Flow
2 - Puzzles
3 - The Puzzles That Didn’t Make The Grade
4 - Setting
5 - Missed Opportunities / Wrapup
This game was one of my favorites and its positions in the rankings is well-deserved. A few items of feedback for the post-comp release:
Several of the secrets are poorly-clued. Ashes in the fireplace and mysterious objects hidden in hollowed books are always suspicious; but the player needs some guidance for why they should be investigating the llama, the meat, or the rose bushes.
The basement wall puzzle is not fully fair. The narrator mentions that the bird is stressing certain syllables; why doesn’t the narrator tell the player what those syllables are? As it is it’s still not clear to me how to deduce the proper code, without the walkthrough.
Maybe you could italicize the correct syllables after the player reads the book explaining the code? As an indication that now the PC is paying attention to them?
I was under the impression that only one letter per line in the grid matched up with the first letter of the corresponding syllable. However, I may have remembered incorrectly.
Re: the syllables thing – it’s not about whether the bird in particular is stressing particular syllables, it’s about whether the English language stresses those syllables. As was explained to me, however, the solution to the puzzle is NOT simply “which syllables are stressed?” – most multiword English sentences have more than one stressed syllable, after all! Gur fbyhgvba vaibyirf znccvat rnpu flyynoyr gb n cbfvgvba ba gur tevq va gur beqre gung gurl nccrne, sebz gbc yrsg gb obggbz evtug. Gur yrggref gb cerff ner gur barf juvpu ner vqragvpny gb gur svefg yrggre bs n fgerffrq flyynoyr.
on preview: Yes, craiglocke has it.
The grid is designed like that, yeah, and I did manage to solve this on my own, but I remember bashing around a little. I’d need to go back and look at it again to remember exactly what gave me trouble, but I know I was misreading the syllables somehow at one point.
I greatly enjoyed this game, it ranked third on my personal competition scores. I enjoyed the intriguing and charmingly described world and also liked the compact but fascinating and vividly described setting. Although the game took place in a relatively small area it never felt like a small game to me. I’m a bit old-fashioned I suppose because my favourite games are usually quite puzzle-heavy which I think is one of the reasons I enjoyed ‘Sub Rosa’ so much, the puzzles are really inventive and fun and, although often very challenging, they do make sense in the bizarre but consistent world of the game. However, the element of the game I enjoyed most was definitely the tidying aspect, it meant I had to approach every puzzle with extra caution because I needed to work out what messes solving it might cause and how I would go about cleaning up such messes. This is a great mechanic I don’t think I’ve seen before and appealed to me particularly because I have often felt guilty for trashing things in games, even when doing so is necessary to finish the game (I know this sounds ridiculous!). I did quite well on my first playthrough, I scored 99%, the only thing I had been unable to replace in the condition I had originally found it was the skull in the dungeon so I replayed and eventually found the, perhaps a little gruesome for my very squeamish tastes, solution to this particular problem. Well done on writing such an entertaining and involving game and I look forward to your future compositions!
I’m pleased people have engaged with the game. The code and syllables puzzle was a challenge to clue and the hint for it ended up more misleading than I intended. I wanted people to think about syllables without the answer outright given to them but it ended up seeming a bit unfair.
Certainly the llama & meat will be better hinted at in the postcomp release. The rose though…
The game is called Sub Rosa. Beneath the rose. Looking beneath the rose is in the title of the game. But sure, there should be a few more threads to it (other than the fact the rose smell unusually and are an unnatural colour).
I’m glad you liked the tidying aspect, Sarah. We were keen on not making it too fiddly and it seemed to have worked out alright.
From the web page:
This is neither here nor there, but for some reason it took me until this year to realize that in IF games, you either LOOK UNDER RUG or MOVE RUG. In Zork I, you move the rug “with a great effort”. But, in real life, you would probably ROLL UP the rug if you wanted to look under it, especially a large one. And especially if you wanted to take it with you. Why is that never handled in IF? It’s definitely going to be a requirement in RollUpComp.
In Finding Martin, rolling a rug is essential on a couple of occasions.
Well, real life is analogue, so it would really depend on how far you wanted to look. For a small rug, or if you just wanted to peek under the edge, you’d simply lift a corner/edge to look under it.
…large rugs seem like more trouble than they’re worth, tbh. Though if the Sub Rosa rug existed for real, it would probably be handy to have regardless of its size (being that it is canonically portable to some degree – not a rug the size of an entire room or something, I mean).
yeah, plus a lot of rugs IRL are taped to the ground so you’d kind of lift a corner
For those still bamboozled by the quailer brick wall puzzle, this is its inner workings.
[spoiler]1. Pick out the first letters of every syllable in the quailer’s song. These syllables are basically the natural stresses heard when a particular word is spoken.
a confessor hears
all our hopes and fears
sealing our secrets
and taking our tears
ACFSH
AOHAF
SLOSC
ATKOT
ABCDE
FGHIJ
KLMNO
PQSRT
ACFSH
AOHAF
SLOSC
ATKOT
ABCDE
FGHIJ
KLMNO
PQSRT
Quick thoughts:
1)This was the game I liked most so I gave it at 9, a vote I gave no other game. I expected/hoped it would rank higher.
2)Like many, that puzzle made me get stuck, and I do think its’ slightly unfair.
It also felt a bit harder because I am not a native English speaker - I do well enough with writing and reading, but pronunciation/syllabication is another matter. I agree with the requests for changing this puzzle a bit
3)I also needed the walkthrough/hints for the llama and rose.
4)I appreciated the worldbuilding, the setting and the many books (I read them all!), though I wish there was a way to read them without typing as many commands. I also appreciated the ‘quirks’ of the protagonist, and I understand that a perfect ending would reveal their ‘true nature’. Correct?
5)Perhaps a weird thing to say but I liked how, in the finale (I didn’t get the best one - that’s an extra reason to replay this eventually!) the protagonist comments that the Confessor, for all his faults, was good at his job. He did not betray the secrets of other people, after all.
I guess that counts as extra ‘moral ambiguity’? (which the game already has a fair bit of)
Part of the confusion for me is that stressed syllables are not the same as just taking the first consonant of every syllable. If you speak the passage out loud, these might be the stressed syllables:
a confessor hears
all our hopes and fears
sealing our secrets
and taking our tears
although the precise classification of stressed and unstressed syllables is debatable, and to some extent depends on how the speaker chooses to read the passage. But reading the solutions, it seems that the stressed syllables don’t actually play a role in determining the final password?
Sure, but the game does say the quailer is singing with an unusual stress pattern. The weird thing for me was so many people got stuck here when the Songs & Codes book explicitly spells out how to solve the puzzle:
The book details the shameful practice of embedding secret codes into songs, whether revealed when played backwards or deciphered from stressed syllables. While disapproving,the work goes into some considerable detail on the mapping of the initial letters of individual syllables in a song line to letters in code grids. The danger here being that songs can be transmitted unwillingly between people once they stick in minds, and so messages may be spread through seemingly innocent ditties that secretly function as ciphers and crypto-mnemonics.
I guess it could have been even clearer.
Yeah, there always seem to be ways you could have. I think when I was testing I
[spoiler]read the book and saw the codes. But I was testing and trying to break stuff, so I didn’t really buckle down to the puzzle.
So, maybe you could put it in more than one book? I’ve definitely run into where I thought I clued something well enough, then I saw, ooh, I could’ve done that, too.
Maybe have a book with a song in it where letters are circled somehow? E.g. someone came before you?[/spoiler]
I have a simple fix for the syllable puzzle.
Given the PC notices certain single syllables are stressed in the song, actually have them specify which syllables they are. It makes the puzzle rather easier and it would be possible to solve without reading the book, but it still wouldn’t be trivial either.
I think part of the problem with the cipher puzzle was just that the answer was buried in one random book amidst more than a hundred other individually-implemented books in the library. I must have spent more than half my playtime just systematically reading all the books on several of the bookshelves, but I didn’t read every single one of them, so of course I missed things. I love the depth of backstory and worldbuilding, but I do think the library was a bit excessive and the information could have been spread out more. Maybe a critical book or two in the bedroom or something, as the Confessor’s bedtime reading.
ETA: Just read through the actual retrospective posts - fascinating! Also, I totally just took the rug and didn’t even think of looking under it first. For me, looking under is a secondary action for a rug that can’t be taken. If it can be taken, then I’m already seeing what’s under it, right? Except when a rug is actually a magical construct that hides a secret exit… Then I felt like I was banging my head on an invisible brick wall since I couldn’t find the basement or the brick wall that was mentioned in the “walkthrough” (which was not actually a walkthrough since it didn’t walk through the whole game - I was disappointed that I couldn’t finish the game during the comp).
We forgot to mention looking under the rug in the walkthrough because we automatically assumed (wrongly so as it turns out) that this would be the canonical thing do to when faced with a rug. This is currently being adjusted for the post comp release so that taking before looking under mentions this.