- I believe you, but what's difficult to suspend disbelief for is that seemingly random or accidental blots would have landed just so precisely as to not be even slightly larger than necessary. There's a saying that "the difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense," and I think the game would benefit from not making the presentation any more contrived than absolutely necessary. You already stretch things a lot, for example by the placements of the search hints at the bottom varying a lot rather than being standardized, and here is a situation where you could at least adjust it easily to no be quite so contrived. But it's just a thought, not something I feel all that strongly about necessarily.
- I see. How about "A New Spin," to play off of both "Round and Round" and the previous Zodiac theme?
- Well, the biggest problem is that you want the even messages to be written as received and read in reverse, to match the other puzzles, but you also want them to be written in reverse so that all the messages could be read together more easily. Considering inclinations like my own to not write out the messages again just for searching, I would embrace that and make it so that instead of spaces to be filled in, the right side of puzzle 12 simply had the puzzle numbers to refer back to. Or instead of straightforwardly giving the numbers, maybe just give a clue for a few of them that reference the puzzle/message indirectly, like the foe carton doodle again. Definitely put the A at the end for the last clue instead of the beginning, though, and/or make it start with an N. And then, on a new page after the last puzzle, it could have 12 spaces to be filled in explicitly, in a descending list, maybe with quotes capping the beginning and end. The ___/144 tracker isn't really needed, and may even be misleading. But you could put a note in green ink, like "One last thing to figure out..." or "Now to put it all together..."
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3. How about extra hints and individual __s, to nudge players toward filling out the word list? https://imgur.com/a/VAZhG0Z The "D" and "N" on the right would hopefully clarify the proper orientation of words. (I specifically want the message spelled out via a two-column list because the canonical leftovers are, e.g. "reviled" (r7) not "deliver" (d7), as shown by the bottom-right corners.)
You still left the last slot in the list starting with A, though. As I already tried to explain, "the last message (which is the same as the puzzle 12 solution) is shown starting with A, and that's also the direction it's read, which breaks the pattern of messages on the right side needing to be read backwards." So replace the A with an N, or put the A at the end. The last clue on the bottom-left (under the smudge) also needs to start with 'a', not 'n', as the clues correspond to how the terms are read, aren't they? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Personally, I would only see those nudges as helping to confirm what to search for in the last puzzle. They wouldn't make me any more inclined to write everything out in the columns. And even if I did write them out, there's no guarantee that I'd realize they're meant to all be read in sequence. I still feel my previous suggestion is the best way to ensure players reach the intended ending. But that's just my opinion.
Regarding the orientation of the final "word" (n15), here's how my logic for how it works:
The trick with Puzzle 12 is that its 12 "words" don't need to actually be words, they just have to be the leftovers.
All leftovers are read top-to-bottom, so the canonical leftovers include nonsense like "foec@rton" (f9). The leftovers are not the reversed versions like "deliver" (hence no "d7" clue). You can confirm this via the bottom-right hints, and also the bottom-left hints of puzzle 12. So for consistency, the bottom of page 12 must say "n15" just like it says "f8". *
The reason I did it this way is so that when the leftovers ( "reviled", "foecart0n", "nowevahwonuoysa", etc.) get written backwards on the right side, the result is a perfectly-readable left-to-right message that's hard to miss.
Hope that makes sense!
*unless I changed the bottom of 12 to have hints like "n8" for "notraceof".
I think I finally get it. The reason it didn't click for me is that thus far, terms on the right column seemed to follow a rule that they always had to form a valid word or phrase when read from right to left. "nowevahwonuoysa" would be the only one not to follow that rule. Actually, more than that, it breaks the bigger, more important rule of these "word searches" always involving searches of actual words, not simply nonsensical letters, so long as you see right-column terms as simply being reversed.
I didn't notice that the puzzle 12 hints were all the same as the bottom-right corner hints, even for ones that go in the right column, which would indeed necessitate writing them backwards. I think I would in fact find it more intuitive if you instead switched up the puzzle 12 hints for the right-column terms as you say ("n8" for "notraceof"), so that they would get written the same as on the previous pages, and this would allow the final term to also follow the pattern of being valid when read backwards from how it's written. Then you could do one last page after where everything gets written out properly, with the right-column terms only reversed there for the final message.
I can see what you were going for, with the elegance of having the final puzzle also serve as the final message all at once, and maybe this isn't an issue most people would be confused by like I was. But speaking for myself at least, it almost made me miss the final message entirely, and I think my suggested approach would help ensure that people understand exactly what you want them to see at the end.