Unseelie hints

Competitions Spring Thing
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Anyone making much progress on Unseelie, in this year’s Back Garden? I think I’ve got everything almost figured out, but there’s one link in the puzzle chain I can’t quite figure out (thanks to @DemonApologist for getting this far, without whose transcript it would have taken me a while to figure out you can open the hatch with a coin – but the transcript seems to get to a premature end due a bug?)

So what I think I need to do is get the oil from the machine’s hatch to get the rust off the one red knob that won’t turn, at which point water should flow to the faucet, allowing me to turn the purple mushroom dust in my cup into the acid the man in the cell needs to escape. At that point I think he’ll read the graffiti and help me distract the creature long enough to get whatever’s in the nest – maybe the keycard we can use in the control panel? Trying to get the oil directly or with the cup doesn’t work, which emphasizes how narrow the opening is, which makes me think I need the hypodermic needle to siphon some up. But the needle is in the cell with the man, so I can’t get to it, and all my attempts to tell him to take the needle or give it to me (using MAN, TAKE NEEDLE syntax), or ask or tell him about the oil or machine, are ending in failure.

This is kinda frustrating since I feel like I have the solution but am running into a guess-the-verb issue, so figured I’d crowdsource – and the mushroom-focused setting is fun enough I’d like to get to the proper ending if I can. FWIW this is TADS.

EDIT: ah, rubber-ducked it! In addition to the hypodermic needle, the game also had “needle” as a synonym for the broken thorn the man had used to try to pick the cell door’s lock. So ASK MAN FOR NEEDLE was defaulting to the thorn; ASK MAN FOR HYPODERMIC works!

Leaving this post up in case other folks are looking for hints too, but hopefully it’s all downhill from here!

EDIT 2: OK, won – that was less involved than I thought, but the author does say they might expand it later.

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HereticMole's Spring 2026 Observations (latest: Before the Snow Melts, 23 Minutes, and Enigmart - all 22 games finished)
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Oh, interesting. I didn’t interpret the ending I received as a bug at the time, rather I just accepted that it was the endpoint for development in the project since the “about” text described it as a work in progress. But it makes sense I guess that the water would turn the powder into acid, and perhaps the game didn’t realize I had skipped that step to end earlier than it meant for me to. I just assumed the pipes were for some future puzzle that was yet to be included properly into the game.

I admit that by the time I was approaching the 2-hour mark for a game I thought was going to be short, I was ready to accept any ending I received. Given how poor my gameplay was throughout to take that long, I don’t think I would have independently come up with “ask man for hypodermic” on my own. I was pretty frazzled. At any rate, I’m glad you were able to discover more of the game’s content than I did!

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