Hey there, I just finished my playthrough of this (took a long break after my first attempt at cracking it). After the long break I fully reviewed my original VOD for episode 1 and had a bunch of breakthroughs and ideas for ways to improve the game a bit further. So if you just want to jump to the feedback, check out episode 2. Thanks for the brilliant game!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe3EhbVG0Fjmp0mbDqy7IkAeHcKGjP-6a&si=03OPyy4H...
Oh wow, thanks for the feedback and for coming back to finish it! I found the first episode a while back, and it was one factor leading me to change Puzzle 11's title to match its category name.
You made good points about certain parts being unfair, but I'm hesitant to reverse IS/NOT/DEW on puzzle #0, or to add more hints to early puzzles like #3. However, I might be able to address most of your concerns just by adding a bigger hint for the bottom text! My current plan is to explicitly label them as "Hints" or "Initial Hints" in puzzle 0, or perhaps add a line of text to puzzle 0 like "Additional hints are at the bottom of each page". (Or perhaps an even more explicit tutorial on puzzle 0?)
I prefer this over hinting about the right-hand side for a few reasons:
- I've seen several players figure out Puzzle 2 without knowing which words were backward, just by using the hints at the bottom. [edit: Ah, I see you still got stuck on 2 after learning the hints.]
- I think it's actually great when the right-hand side is the last discovery. Some players, like the streamer Dwarfwoot, had a great time on puzzle 12 because they didn't realize the leftovers would be backwards until they started filling in the blanks.
- As you said, teaching about the hints on the bottom is super important. They help with puzzles 1 and 3, and make the word list order feel less arbitrary. Some players actually solved the whole book without using the hints, and then were confused and disappointed that they weren't a secret extra message to solve at the end.
What do you think? Would an "Initial Hints" label in puzzle 0 have been an adequate clue for you?
17 days ago(+1)
Thanks for your detailed reply! Yeah I think setting up the hints more explicitly on Puzzle 0 is a great idea. Honestly the hints are extremely important to generating the "solution pressure" I was talking about all across the puzzle and while I completely understand them now with the curse of knowledge I think a blind player suspecting they are more complex than they actually are, or relate to some coordinate system, etc is a pretty reasonable concern. Explicitly calling them out as hints on the very simple Puzzle 0 should go a long way toward clearing up that ambiguity.
Thanks again for making this puzzle, after seeing the couple updates you did since the version I played it is very close to being a total masterpiece! And it is already very brilliant. As me and one of my viewers discussed, I think language-driven epiphany puzzles like this are just mildly cursed to begin with, and anything you do to make them more explicit/obvious robs them of their magic a bit. So I think you've done the best conceivable job of threading that needle with the updates you've made so far.
By the way, the backwards rules are pretty consistent, despite being confusing: If you use the clues on the bottom-right, you can see that the canonical leftovers are, e.g., Drawer (d6) and Foe Carton (f9). These words don't need to make sense, since 12's category is "leftovers" not "parts of a message". Similarly, puzzle 0 can have words like "dew" because 0 has no category it needs to follow. I admit it's weird that these words only spell a message backwards (left-to-right) but it's consistent between puzzles 0 and 12 and I'm fairly confident it's better than the reverse (which I did try in an earlier version).