...oh, I see, you can put tiles on top of other tiles. That would have been a really good thing to know (didn't the tutorial stress they can only go in blank spaces?).
The other thing is that sometimes it won't let me play a tile at all if it doesn't make a word (hence my previous question about having to keep extending), but sometimes it does. When it does, it's much easier: get a five letter word, hang an "E" off the end that doesn't make a word, wait for an R or a D.
I feel like there's definitely something good here, but it could use more clarity.
So, first, if you look at the tutorial, then every new game you start actually just reruns the tutorial, which isn't great.
Also, though: how does this game even work? For instance, one of my rows of three stones started GUB. There aren't any words that start with GUB (well, OK, "gubernatorial", but that's more than seven letters). What are you supposed to do with that row?
Or: another row started ORB. OK, I put an S after that, and hooray, it's a word. But then what? Is the only way to get a seven letter word to form a four-letter word, then add a letter to make a word, then do that two more times?
The tutorial wasn't particularly helpful in this regard. How are you supposed to play it?
There's something that's either a clever trick or a bug. If it's a bug I don't want to exploit it, but if it's a clever trick you're supposed to use I don't want to give it away, so, in rot13: Vf vg fhccbfrq gb or gur pnfr gung vs lbh uvg gur "T" gb erfrg n tneqra, naq gura haqb, vg qbrfa'g haqb gur erfrg (fb gung lbh pna fgneg sebz gur zvqqyr bs gur tneqra)?
I appreciate the concept, but this doesn't work at all. The game has a very, very limited sense of what counts as "synonymous", so that "She ran like the wind" wasn't considered a synonym of "She ran as fast as lightning", or "The cake tasted great" for "The cake was delicious". It didn't even take "The feline is on the mat" for "The cat is on the mat" (it wanted "The feline is on the rug"? Rugs and mats aren't even the same thing!)
At best this is a guessing game, and a pretty ridiculous one at that, because no one is going to write "the dessert is scrumptious".
In which I prove once again that I'm unable to resist a challenge. And this is a subject I don't know much about (not the "women" part per se, but the field), so I've been fascinated to learn.
Unfortunately I have something wrong. If my answers are 01110011 01100101 01110110 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01110011 00101100 00100000 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100110 01101001 01110110 01100101 00101101 01100001 01101110 01100100 00101101 01110011 01100101 01110110 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011, can you tell from that which one is off?
Just to be sure, is there any sort of "final message", or does solving entail only finding the words in the eight grids? (I've done the latter. But the hat tip to "12 Word Searches" made me wonder. And to put a few things in rot13 for spoiler reasons: Gur hahfhny fcnpvat bs gur pbvaf nybat gur obggbz bs gur gvgyr cntr, naq gur cebzvarag P/Z pbva, znqr zr guvax gurer zvtug or fbzrguvat tbvat ba. Gur zvqqyr ebjf bs gur sbhe onpx tevqf ernq, va beqre, RKNZU-HZRAA-HBQVR-YRHQE, be "rknz uhzna, abj qvr yrnqre!", vs lbh qba'g ernq vg irel pnershyyl. Ohg V qbhog gung'f n zrffntr.)
I did find a green diamond under the purple blocks, but only one, after breaking a pretty large number of them. There really doesn't seem to be much under them, which does kind of slow the game down considerably.
I could've used the ability to zoom out further: I'd get a new route, and spend time trying to even find them on the map.
I had a real vowel problem: There were a lot of times when I had no vowels; there's always the delete option, but that loses you tiles, and I'm not sure I got any vowels at all in my last fifteen letters (which made it really hard to get new tiles).
I played through once, died (since I was still getting the hang of it, of course). Now when I hit "play" on the title screen, it takes me to...nothing. Gray stone background, arches, no option to choose a character and start. That seems like a bug? :-)
In the first level, the goal is behind the gray pillar, which makes it impossible to see; for a while I didn't even know what I was supposed to be doing. Something to change the camera angle would help.
The difference between a card being active and not active is very subtle, to the point that I rearranged the cards, clicked "go", and couldn't figure out why nothing was happening.
When I did something wrong on the first level, I couldn't find a way to reset.
As a puzzle, "arrange 9 tiles in a grid" hits some limits pretty quickly. But, the design is amazing: the use of depth to get ridges and waterfalls and hills, the directional flow of rivers to a lake, the bridges that help interlock the rivers with the roads...
Even after saying "sure, nine tiles, I get it," I kept looking back and wanting to know how the next set fit together. I can see this as the basis for something much larger, if you wanted it to be. (4x4 grids! People and boats! A plot!)
Aha! The problem I had was that I was walking very slowly into the room with the ice cube, which meant it froze me before I had made it all the way to the point where the guide explains it. When I picked it up to try it again (and the water fountain issue is definitely fixed now!), I walked in at normal speed, which did in fact keep me gliding up to the cube (to get the explanation) and past it.
Is seeing ice supposed to, well, freeze the game? It's thematic, but it's also kind of annoying to have to reset the level every time you accidentally look at ice.
Also, while I was edging my way south down the fire while facing east, I kept dying--I guess a fountain just slipped out of my line of sight? Even though I was still facing a row of them? I think this a cool concept, but I worry that what exactly counts as "within the field of vision" is too fiddly.
On the other, when I realized I needed to pick up 39 pieces of trash--five at a time--it suddenly felt like it was going to be more tedious than I was going to have the patience for.
Dangit! I'd figured out everything through step 8, but just didn't see that final question in #8. (And I thought I was so close with <rot13>fvkgl-guerr gubhfnaq</rot13>. Thanks for writing this out as a series of hints!
Honestly I thought I'd tried the triple jump thing. (It's not a terribly obvious thing to try, after double-jump doesn't work, but I think I was desperate.)
What I saw, though, I really like; it's the kind of mix of puzzle and metroidvania that we don't see enough of. I hope you stick with it!
...and now I'm stuck again, but not in the "error in the system" way, just in a "what am I supposed to do from here" way. I've got four arrow keys and the space bar, but there's a block in the air that I can't move down far enough to reach; and getting back to the start requires giving up the up-arrow to take the elevator-block, but then needs an up-arrow to get past the walls.
(Also I put the spacebar in Experiment 3 and got...a mini-sunglasses guy, but no controls.)
Oh, I was really liking this until I got stuck! (I went back to the left from the up-elevator, to the place below the ?-shaped nook that had an up-arrow in it, and since I only have left and right arrows now, I can't get out of the shallow pit I'm in.)
Aw, this was super-cute. (And it's a relief to see a game that isn't about popping bubbles. Seriously, it's a neat twist on the theme, and with genuine puzzle content and not just "say a thing, get on the speech bubble". Really good.)
Unfortunately, that's also its biggest flaw. I knew I needed to make a shovel, and I had part of one but needed a long piece of wood, and the scenery is filled with long pieces of wood that look more like the body of a shovel than the 2x4 that had screws in it. There's nothing to distinguish "this is scenery" from "this is meaningful": the shelves you can click look just like the shelves you can't, the dirt you can click looks just like the dirt you can't. So it's less "think through the escape puzzle" and more "run the mouse over everything looking for something to do".
And while the puzzles had a certain internal consistency--poke holes in the barrel to drain the water so you can get to the contents; use the pliers and wire to make a lockpick--they didn't have external motivation. I clicked on the pliers and the work table, and nothing happened. I clicked on the wire and the work table, and...for some reason I could put it there. I used the pliers on it and...I had a lockpick, but nothing told me I even wanted one. (Other than a lot of locks, and the lockpick didn't work on most of them.) Same thing with the barrel: sure, it had water, but there was no logic to tell me "you want to drain it" (as opposed to "you'll find a bottle later that you need to fill with water"), so there was no reason to poke it with the awl.
It's actually worse than that: if you do press "enter", you're inserting a new line. I just lost several minutes typing the right command and clicking "enter" because I'd previously tried something else, hit enter, and it looked like I had an empty box--but no, I had the previous text there, scrolled up a line.
Vullinius, it'd be great if that's a thing that can be fixed--at the very least, clear the box after clicking so that the old text isn't there, maybe.
This was cute! The cooking might've been a little stressful, but we made it through (yes, two of us, I didn't, like, cheat and read both books). Thanks for sharing this!
Yeah, it's...the thing about LLMs is that often they're very bad at analyzing language. (See the entire "how many r's in strawberry" discussion/meme.) I think before a game like this can really work, LLMs have a long way to go [and, full disclosure, I'd personally suggest that "into the garbage" is where they should go...].
Mmm. It's interesting, but I'm not sure it's working? My main strategy was "just copy what someone else said", which was great until the last round, when I got:
"After analyzing all responses and behavior patterns, I determine that Fred is human. Fred copied Charles verbatim, indicating lack of originality typical of a bot."
So the second sentence says I'm a bot...and therefore I'm human? Hm.
Sadly my losing level-1 answer was overwritten, but I was dinged for not following the rhyme scheme, which I absolutely did. (That's the point at which I decided to just start copying someone else's answer.)
tried playing but started glitching early when i built a thing 0/10
Sorry, no, seriously, that's pretty entertaining. The mechanics are solid and now I feel invested in the story line. (Plus a post-credits scene even!) Very nice work!
