Hey -- wow, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment!
I know my reply here turned out to be suuuper wordy, but even if it feels like nbd to you this legitimately marks twice now you've saved us on this game and I just want to express my gratitude:
Throughout the course of the jam so far we've gotten a lot of feedback reaffirming what we suspected on submission -- that the puzzles are, sadly, kind of unsolvable at the moment without a better/more responsive way to guide the player to the goal. But at least for me, reading you talk about how you had the most fun when you could just relax and create something your own rather than trying to find a pie-in-the-sky solution suddenly made a major light go off.
I've been trying to figure out how to fit a subjective peg into an objective hole, but the joy of this game concept and about blackout poetry in general was never about finding a set solution, but about turning something set and static into something unique and unexpected. I got so much more excited seeing you post your own creative take than I have at any point watching someone stumble blindly into the arbitrary correct solution after trying a bunch of other beautiful combinations that totally should have worked. This is how the game was meant to be played, and this is what was exciting about it before it was distilled with the perceived need to make it "gamier". We don't need to set up guardrails shepherding the player along an arbitrary path; we need to move the goalposts entirely. What exactly that'll entail, I'm still not sure, but it's a really important distinction that I really hope we can find a way to follow through on now that it's been clarified.
Anyway, suffice it to say: love your poem so much. If you're willing to share, I'd also be very interested in hearing your mechanical nitpicks, just in case we do find it in us to keep polishing this game until we can get it to that full-potential dreamstate. ███ ███!
