{"id":96,"date":"2013-06-10T03:48:08","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T10:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/?p=96"},"modified":"2013-06-20T12:33:46","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T19:33:46","slug":"lucian-p-smith-on-best-individual-puzzle-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"Lucian P. Smith on Best Individual Puzzle 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucian P. Smith writes on the hold-all in A Killer Headache<\/a>, making a taco in Shuffling Around<\/a>, and surviving the fall in Bigger Than You Think<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Best Individual Puzzle category is sort of an odd duck in the XYZZY Awards\u2014the really good puzzle games tend to have so many good puzzles it\u2019s hard to single out just one to bequeath with a \u2018best puzzle\u2019 nomination, so the votes get spread out a lot, and this year there apparently weren\u2019t many short games where the entire game was a single sort of puzzle and you could just nominate the last one as a stand-in for the whole game (cf Emily\u2019s Indigo<\/a><\/em> last year), so I happen to know that the three nominated puzzles this year were the three that happened to get two votes each\u2014all the rest of the nominations only had one vote.\u00a0 Which means that next year, if you and a friend both nominate the same puzzle, it\u2019s in like Flynn.\u00a0 A little bit of XYZZY insider information for you.<\/p>\n

(Actually, the current plan is to have a running poll on ifdb<\/a> for \u2018puzzles that strike your fancy\u2019, so that might work out much better to gain consensus about which particular puzzles from big puzzle games should be nominated as \u2018best puzzle\u2019.\u00a0 We\u2019ll see if it works!)<\/p>\n

In case you might not have predicted it, I am going to explicitly spoil all the puzzles here as much as I can, so if you want to play them yourself first (and you do indeed want to solve \u2018Bigger Than You Think\u2019 by yourself), you should go do that before coming back.<\/p>\n

Full transcripts of my playthroughs of the game are available at http:\/\/spod-central.org\/~lpsmith\/IF\/xyzzies\/BestPuzzle2013\/<\/a><\/p>\n

So, the first puzzle on the list is:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

The Hold-Al<\/b>l from A Killer Headache<\/b><\/em>, by Mike Ciul<\/h3>\n

So, I started this game<\/a> knowing that there was probably a \u2018hold-all\u2019 in it, which is Inform-ese for \u2018an object that can contain an arbitrary number of items for you to carry around\u2019.\u00a0 So when I was messing around in the first room, and doing something automatically had me put something inside a hollow skull, I thought, \u201cAh, OK, there\u2019s the hold-all.\u201d\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t actually get it out of the room, though, so I went on without it, figuring I\u2019d get it later.<\/p>\n

And then I finished the game without it.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, I played version 3 of the game, which happens to be significantly easier than version 1 of the game, which, presumably, had caught the imagination of two impressionable nominators out there, who had worked hard to get the skull out of that opening room, and were satisfied when they finally managed it.\u00a0 \u201cOK,\u201d I thought, \u201cI\u2019ll try it again.\u201d\u00a0 So I went back to that opening room.\u00a0 The trick here is that there\u2019s a few things in the room that might be useful (but weren\u2019t, in my playthrough, since there were alternatives out in the wide-open world) but in order to open the awkward door, you have to use both your hands, so you can\u2019t carry anything.\u00a0 A reasonable enough setup for a puzzle!\u00a0 So I thought a moment, said to myself, \u201cWell, I dunno, maybe I can wear it or something.\u201d\u00a0 I typed >WEAR SKULL, it bit me in the back, and off I went.\u00a0 Puzzle solved!<\/p>\n

As it turns out, the somewhat odd phrasing I could have used was to tell the skull, \u201cBITE ME\u201d, which requires that you think of it biting you in the back before it actually does so, which actually is a nice bit of lateral thinking, if perhaps a bit unlikely to occur to most people.\u00a0 But if you do think of it yourself, I bet you feel pretty proud of the fact that you did so, and that might be enough to get you to nominate the game.\u00a0 And apparently it happened at least twice, so kudos to A Killer Headache<\/em> for that.<\/p>\n

The next puzzle was:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Making a taco<\/b> in Shuffling Around<\/b><\/em>, by Andrew Schulz<\/h3>\n

I guess I\u2019m not going to get very far in this review without admitting up front that I didn\u2019t actually manage to make a taco in Shuffling Around<\/em><\/a> by Andrew Schulz.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t even get to a point where it seemed like a taco might be necessary, because I got partway in and was defeated by the sheer number of Word Puzzles With No Plot that piled up and overwhelmed me.\u00a0 And actually, by the sheer number of Anagram References in what started to seem like every. single. description.\u00a0 This is the sort of game where calling someone \u2018Old Man Almond\u2019 and saying \u2018He\u2019d make a poignant nag point\u2019 is seen as sufficiently clever in and of itself, and the fact that nobody is actually named \u2018Almond\u2019* or that nags are not actually known for pointing, nor has one ever in the history of the English language until now been called \u2018poignant\u2019 is apparently irrelevant.\u00a0 It was mentally both taxing and infuriating for me to just read the descriptions, and I started to feel hostile towards the game, especially when I managed to solve a puzzle.\u00a0 The point at which solving the puzzles is more frustrating to you than being stuck was is the point at which one must exit gracefully stage left, so that is what I did.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I have also been playing Counterfeit Monkey<\/em><\/a> since it won so many XYZZY awards, and despite also being deeply steeped in word puzzlery, I am enjoying it greatly.\u00a0 What\u2019s the difference, you might ask?\u00a0 I think it goes back to song parodies.\u00a0 Bear with me a moment.<\/p>\n

I performed for many years in the improve troupe, \u201cComedySportz\u201d, and we would often do song games, where you had to improvise lyrics on the spot.\u00a0 One thing I learned from that experience was that the rhyming words at the end of the phrases are key to the comedy of the song.\u00a0 Furthermore, the order and relevance of the rhyming words was also critical.\u00a0 If you had one word that related to the thing you were singing about, and another word whose only connection to the first was that it rhymed, you had two options: you could use the relevant word first, or you could use the irrelevant word first.\u00a0 The first was the least funny.\u00a0 If you are singing a song, and the audience suggestion is \u2018bats\u2019, and your first line is \u201cI once owned a bat\u201d and your second line is, \u201cI probably should have got a cat\u201d, it\u2019s obvious to everyone in the room that the only reason you\u2019re talking about cats is to make the line rhyme, and it\u2019s not very funny.\u00a0 Slightly better is to reverse the order:\u00a0 make your *first* line, \u201cWhen I was young, I wanted a cat\u201d, and then follow that up with \u201cInstead, my father got me a bat\u201d, the second-line reveal of the audience suggestion as a rhyme to \u2018cat\u2019 makes the audience suddenly recognize why you were singing about a cat, and that\u2019s funny.\u00a0 It\u2019s even funnier if you can take it a step away from such an on-the-nose rhyme:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m singing this song in my best soprano \/ that\u2019s all I can sing, since that explosion of bat guano\u201d may not be the height of comedy, but at least people don\u2019t instantly know why you said \u2018soprano\u2019, so there\u2019s a better payoff by the end of the next line.\u00a0 The best, though, is if you can manage to make both<\/b> rhymes relevant to the suggestion.\u00a0 \u201cA vampire bat will make you a blood donor \/ It flies straight to your neck with the aid of its sonar\u201d might again not be terribly witty (I don\u2019t know why I picked \u2018bats\u2019 as my suggestion here), and it\u2019s kind of a slant rhyme, but the story as a whole and its relevance to the rhymes is the most coherent in this version.<\/p>\n

One thing about Counterfeit Monkey<\/em> that is lacking in Shuffling Around<\/em> is coherence.\u00a0 You find objects that were placed there by the author as solutions to puzzles in places where you would actually find those objects.\u00a0 More obviously, the entire world is set up around the fa\u00e7ade of a real place where manipulating objects through wordplay is a known and accepted fact of life, and not in a surreal dreamland where these things happen \u2018just because\u2019.<\/p>\n

Also, and this has nothing to do with comedy, the solution space is much cleaner with a letter-remover than it is with anagrams:\u00a0 A word n<\/i> letters long has at most n<\/i> alternative letter-removed versions, while it has up to n<\/i>-factorial\u00a0 possible anagrams.\u00a0 It\u2019s much less taxing.<\/p>\n

So, I apologize for not making you a taco, Andrew Schulz, but this game was not for me.<\/p>\n

*I am told that there was a \u2018Marc Almond\u2019 who was in the band, \u2018Soft Cell\u2019, so it appears this statement was incorrect.\u00a0 Again, though:\u00a0 coherence.\u00a0 If \u2018Old man Almond\u2019 was preceded by an actual \u2018Soft Cell\u2019 reference, fine.\u00a0 Dropped in the middle of nowhere, it\u2019s the rhyme thrown in just because it rhymes, or, in this case, the anagram thrown in just because it\u2019s an anagram.<\/p>\n

Finally, we get to:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Surviving the fall<\/b> in Bigger Than You Think,<\/b><\/em> by Andrew Plotkin<\/h3>\n

This game<\/a> is actually the closest we have to Indigo<\/em> from last year, namely, a game wherein the point is to figure out how to do one thing, and then do that a few times to solve the game.\u00a0 \u2018Surviving the fall\u2019 is one of those things that you do after you\u2019ve figured out the One Thing, but it actually is a pretty good candidate as the Puzzle That Stands For The Game Itself, since\u2026 but, OK, let me describe what the One Thing is.<\/p>\n

The conceit of this game is that on any given playthrough but the last, you are going to get stuck, but hopefully at that point you will have gained an item or some knowledge, which you then retain for your next playthrough.\u00a0 In that subsequent playthrough, you will then be able to get past some barrier because you now have the item or knowledge you picked up previously.\u00a0 Also, the game is basically CYOA, but you also have the option of \u2018choosing\u2019 the thing-you-picked-up-the-last-time.\u00a0 An example:\u00a0 you fall down a gravel slide, at the bottom of which is a rope, which you pick up.\u00a0 You can\u2019t get out of the pit, even with the rope, so you restart.\u00a0 But this time, you have a rope with you.\u00a0 During this playthrough, you come to an eye-bolt over a pit, and even though the highlighted choices are \u2018side\u2019 and \u2018ahead\u2019 you can type >ROPE instead, and suddenly you can descend into the pit.\u00a0 It\u2019s a clever conceit, and made for an enjoyable, short game.<\/p>\n

The reason \u2018surviving the fall\u2019 is probably the best iteration of the puzzle is that it\u2019s not at all obvious that you haven\u2019t actually already died at the point where you can save yourself.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the text:<\/p>\n

>DOWN<\/i><\/p>\n

Another stretched-step downward, groping for ledges with your toes. Then another, then another — until slick stone shrugs your foot away.<\/i><\/p>\n

Now you are plunging through the darkness, which roars at you and blurs past your flailing hands.<\/i><\/p>\n

Somewhere below is the end of your journey. Such a thing should not be spoken of, lest one decide that life has yielded up its last marvel. Shall we instead start the story from the beginning?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s perfectly reasonable to think that >START (highlighted) is the only thing you can\/should do here, and that if there\u2019s any other way to get down, you probably should have set that up before typing \u2018>DOWN\u2019 in the first place.\u00a0 And in fact, thinking that you could survive the fall at all is probably something that might not have occurred to me, had I not been playing this game for the express purpose of trying out the \u2018Surviving the fall\u2019 puzzle, which sort of gave things away.<\/p>\n

But if you get the idea \u2018maybe I can survive this\u2019 and then during one playthrough you acquire a sturdy umbrella, you might suddenly think to try:<\/p>\n

Somewhere below is the end of your journey. Such a thing should not be spoken of, lest one decide that life has yielded up its last marvel. Shall we instead start the story from the beginning?<\/i><\/p>\n

>UMBRELLA<\/i><\/p>\n

The notion is absurd, but do you have a better idea while plummeting to your death? You yank out your umbrella and pop it open.<\/i><\/p>\n

Whump! The handle yanks you around hard. You crack your knee and shoulder against the rushing stone… but you hang on to the bumbershoot, and somehow the roaring in your ears is decreasing. You cannot tell, in the dimness, how much the umbrella slows you — but when the bottom of the pit reaches up and smacks you, the impact is bruising, not fatal.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One thing that makes this puzzle solution even more satisfying is that it feels like a direct confrontation between you and the game\u2014one in which you end up victorious.\u00a0 The game was going to send you to your death, but no!\u00a0 You had a brilliant idea and thwarted the very fundamentals of your situation, and the game had no choice<\/i> but to let you survive!\u00a0 This is, of course, absurd\u2014Andrew coded in the response explicitly, and even set things up exactly that way so that you would succeed, but that doesn\u2019t change the momentary feeling I had at my moment of triumph: I was better than the game; I managed to beat it at its own rules, forcing it to capitulate.<\/p>\n

This same feeling is absent from the majority of the other puzzles in the game, though many are indeed satisfying.\u00a0 But when the game shows you an eye-bolt, and then gives you a rope, you know you\u2019re playing by its rules when you tie the rope to the eye-bolt.\u00a0 When you are shown a surface you cannot climb, and then are given climbing shoes, you know you\u2019re playing by its rules when you don the shoes to climb the surface.\u00a0 Whether you see the square peg first or the square hole first, by the time you have both, you know what to do.\u00a0 But here, you\u2019re given an umbrella and a \u2018game over: you are falling to your death\u2019 message,\u00a0 and though they were, of course, designed to go together just as much as the eye-bolt and the rope, putting the two together feels more like an act of control, perhaps, than it does an act of discovery.<\/p>\n

At any rate, it was a pleasing moment, and I\u2019m satisfied that this puzzle was the one nominated from the game, and that it won \u2018Best Individual Puzzle\u2019 overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucian P. Smith writes on the hold-all in A Killer Headache, making a taco in Shuffling Around, and surviving the fall in Bigger Than You Think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,2],"tags":[52,24,30,51,25,50,53,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}