Post by Tahnan in Spell Escape comments

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I think I may come back when it's been updated. I'm interested to see how it all works, but with three spells I'm not sure where I'm going next.

And...guessing the spells may be kind of a lot. I thought the ambiguity of the second spell was interesting--I know I'm not the only person who tried [rot13] "whzc" first, and I liked the little challenge of figuring out the right word, but for the third spell there were just too many options: I thought it was "fyvqr", and then tried "tyvqr", and even after hints for all but the first letter I was trying "fyvat".

I plan to be back though!

Alan Robinson, Developer6 days ago

Yes I found the guessing hard, too. But with the hint method it wasn't blocking. good compromise.

Tahnan6 days ago

Oh, certainly the hint method lets you work around it, but it's a basic flaw in a puzzle if the only way to get the answer is to ask for hints (or, in this case, to more or less literally spell out the answer).

Alan Robinson, Developer6 days ago

maybe the puzzle you solve is realizing you have to use the hint ;-)

point taken, tho.

snakebyte366 days ago (1 edit)

Fair enough. I wanted the words to not be immediately obvious because if you see water and can just type "swim" then it's not much of a puzzle. It's certainly possible that I overcompensated and made the words too hard to deduce. It's tough for me to tell how difficult the puzzles are when I'm the one making them, and since it was for a game jam I didn't have much time for playtesting. Maybe I could have a difficulty option that changes the amount of letters you get by default. I also think it's fair to say that if anyone don't feel like the "deduce the words from the notes" aspect is working for them, they can just use hints to skip it since that is only one piece of the puzzle, there is still plenty more to do.

I may also need to write a little hint guide to provide some nudges to a few points of the game because I believe you are likely at what will be a common sticking point. I'm not exactly sure how to indicate what to do in game any better without making it too obvious. Who knew designing puzzles was so hard, eh?

itch.io

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