Another great wordplay game from Andrew! I was very excited for this one, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s got a similar-but-distinct mechanic from the Prime Pro Rhyme Row series, so it was fun to get to try something new. It’s also shorter and a bit simpler than the longest of those games, which may make it more accessible to newcomers. At first I worried it would be too easy, but there were some that stumped me!
Unlike in the PPRR games, there are no in-game hints or puzzle cheats, so I turned to the walkthrough a couple times. Hints and a bit more clueing on some of the puzzles (e.g., letting you know that “manna” isn’t something you have to solve) would make the game just about perfect IMO.
I apparently didn’t get the best ending on my first playthrough, so I’m definitely going to play again and see if I can fix that!
I’ve seen multiple people mention hints in their reviews, so it seems I was wrong about this! I’m assuming now that the hint item is the war pawn, which I confess I collected and then promptly forgot about.
This has been really fun! I love a good “screw around with words” game, and this one is.
While the expected wordplay format was easy to figure out, I got hung up for a bit on the first puzzle: I gave more significance to “Dumb pit. Dump it!” and “Aww, flake! Awful ache!” than they actually had, trying to think of near-homophones. After that, I inexplicably convinced myself that the game was looking for a separate homophonous name and purpose that were clued nowhere in the text, instead of paying attention to the boldface clue slapping me in the face. Never let it be said I can’t overthink things in completely unhelpful ways. I gave up and checked the walkthrough after ten minutes so as not to run out the timer at the starting line.
After that first hurdle, the internal logic of the game snapped into place and I was able to get through most of the rest pretty easily on my own, with only occasional hints. The overarching structure of the game ended up nudging me away from “x flier” for longer than it should have. I let myself struggle a bit before I checked, though, and only made it to 47(+1)/54-55 by the two-hour limit as a result. I might be an outlier on gameplay time. Looking forward to the rest post-rating.
Word puzzles are a motherclutcher. I had a lot of trouble with one of the first puzzles a name → an aim, but that gave me enough understanding to fly through a whole bunch in the middle, and I had a lot of fun doing it. There were still a couple late in the game that made me struggle.I don’t think I could have finished it without hints. Fun, but not easy.
At one point I got stuck not knowing which rooms currently had solvable puzzles, so I really enjoyed the war pawn’s ability to let me know “there’s nothing left here” or “you should come back later”. But then I used it in a room that happened to have an active puzzle, and it solved the puzzle for me, and then… it exploded.
For me it was different: I was well aware that the war pawn was probably a hint-giver, but I could not find out how to use it. I always only tried with “Warp own”, but that produced the comment “Yes, the war pawn will help you warp, but permit me some pedantry: which way? Backwards?”
Now I gave it another try and found the correct wording.