Hard Puzzle

by Ade McT profile

Episode 1 of Hard Puzzle Trilogy
Science Fiction
2015

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Number of Ratings: 13
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1-13 of 13


- wisprabbit (Sheffield, UK), July 1, 2023

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Redefining the word "puzzle", February 3, 2021
by AKheon (Finland)
Related reviews: horror, parser-based, Inform

Hard Puzzle is a one-room parser-based game by Ade McT, published in 2015. You are a person held in a garage against your will, and you're told that you must assemble a three-legged stool to please your mysterious benefactors, or tormentors, called The Family.

The setting is that of undefined post-apocalyptic sci-fi or horror, with only dramatic proper nouns like The Event hinting at what grave terrors may have occurred in the past. The writing style is terse, which gives the game some sense of mystery - the player doesn't get to learn much about the exact circumstances of the game world, or even what's really at stake with this whole stool assembling operation.

Mystery really is the key thing about Hard Puzzle, and this extends to the gameplay and implementation too. You deal with a lot of different objects during your time in the garage - the stool parts, plus other miscellaneous things you find around the room - and figuring out how to use any of it is, ostensibly, a large part of the gameplay. Many items are discovered by taking apart other items, but the game never explicitly lists what you get when doing this. You have to keep manually checking your inventory, trying to keep a mental track of what is new, what might be useful and how everything connects to everything else. It's all somewhere between engrossing and frustrating.

With the slightly unhelpful and rough implementation, along with certain mechanical quirks that may very well be bugs, the game comes across a bit rough around the edges. Then again, it is said to be a "speed-IF", so maybe this is understandable. Many would even say that the technical shortcomings add to the odd charm of the game.

(Spoiler - click to show)The repetitive nature of trying to assemble the stool eventually makes you question the whole ordeal. You start wondering if, like the intro suggests, there could be a way to escape. As the player is stuck in the minimalistic environment doing the same things over and over again, even the mechanical quirks themselves acquire a significant meaning. For example, I personally started wondering whether the weirdly teleporting assembled stool could be used to leave the room. The way the fourth wall is broken here and there also casts doubt on everything the game claims to be about. Are the apparent implementation flaws a part of the design after all? What parts of Hard Puzzle are red herrings? Is it really a speed-IF? Can you take anything about the game for certain on a meta-level?

(Spoiler - click to show)Hard Puzzle is a trollish meta-game that is veiled in misinformation and deception. It's a puzzle game where the player knows neither the rules or the objective. It's a dysfunctional sandbox with a lot of moving parts that don't connect to each other. It's a contrived enigma. My opinion is that while the meta aspect is clever, it is essentially a game designed to waste the player's time.

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6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Total waste of effort, September 20, 2020

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)Some other reviews here treat the Hard Puzzle series with a tone of mysticism. I agree that the game is interesting and seeps out a profound sense of horror. However, this is ruined by the fact that the game's solution is dumb, unclued, guess-the-verb (despite being a standard verb), and not interesting at all.

After examining the Glulx strings, I beat the game and regretted all the effort I had put in so far. I'm very glad I disassembled the game rather than continued to try things. (Spoiler - click to show)The solution is one command long. In my opinion, it is an implementation bug that the game responds to (Spoiler - click to show)"u" with (Spoiler - click to show)"You can't go that way."

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- Elizabeth DeCoste (Canada), April 11, 2020

- IanAllenBird, December 13, 2019

- Andrew Schultz (Chicago), September 4, 2018

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A purposely obnoxious short puzzle about tons of pieces, June 11, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

Hard Puzzle is obnoxious on purpose. You need to assemble a stool, but everything goes wrong, and you start to find more and more parts.

The author intentionally makes the game underimplemented, with guess-the-verb, standard response, etc. going on. It claims to be a speed-IF that isn't too hard, but it is hard.

I decompiled it to figure it out. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's good at what it sets out to do.

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- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), May 19, 2016

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I'm a sucker for punishment..., January 18, 2016
by Aaron (Lille, France)

Something about this game drew me in, then beat me over the head and left me wanting more. A milk stool? What? The Family? The Event? I started frantically exploring the room and items trying to find more story and have to say that I am thoroughly stuck. I think I spent an hour getting nowhere, and loved it! This is the most fun I've had playing IF in a long time. I didn't save my progress and will probably try it again tomorrow.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
That was unexpected..., January 1, 2016
by Deboriole (San Diego, CA)

I have been obsessed with beating this game since it came out. I opened the game this morning (not expecting to get anywhere with it), and after a bit of tinkering I tried something I hadn't tried before and was stunned when a paragraph of text appeared followed by *** The End ***.

I can't decide if I think the solution is clever so I will leave the review centered at 3 stars to be as impartial as possible. Good luck to all of you who still have yet to solve it.

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- gaite, December 27, 2015

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A hard puzzle, November 20, 2015
by CMG (NYC)

As a rule, I'm not that enthusiastic about puzzles, and yet I was drawn into this game and beat my head against it for two entire days. This was more than a hard puzzle for me. This was a mini life experience.

What happened? I'm not that great at manipulating finicky things in parser games, and this game is loaded, loaded, loaded with them. I usually give up on puzzles, and although I talked with other people to make some progress by exchanging hints, I didn't make much progress that way at all. But I never considered stopping. I had to finish. I needed to figure out what the hell was going on, both on a story level and on a meta level.

Hard Puzzle is set in an apocalyptic world where you have been tasked with assembling a stool for "The Family" because they "like the look of it." This stool is intended "for milking." Even though the story is sparse, little details here and there worked their way into my brain like parasites and wouldn't get out. Whereas other puzzle games often lose my interest by requiring too much mechanical tinkering, Hard Puzzle's strangeness wouldn't release me, even while it was clobbering me with more and more mechanical tinkering nightmares.

But what made me truly unable to leave the game alone was that I didn't know on what level I could trust it. Hard Puzzle bills itself as silly speed-IF, but is this true? It has implementation errors, as you would expect in speed-IF, but it acknowledges these errors. And perhaps more than anything, it was written by Ade McT, whose game Map placed second in the IFComp mere days before Hard Puzzle was released onto IFDB.

Normally, not being able to trust a game means not wanting to play it because you think it might be unfair or broken. In this case, not being able to trust it made the experience even more compelling for me.

Now that I have solved Hard Puzzle, I look back at my time playing it these past two days and... feel inclined to say nothing about how right or wrong I was to suspect anything about this game. I think that some people might never solve it. I think that some people might solve it much faster than I did.

There is a famous murder mystery play by Agatha Christie called The Mousetrap that has been running since 1952, and although countless people have now seen the play, its ending is rarely ever discussed in order to preserve the surprise for new audiences. For that same reason, I hope that no walkthrough is ever provided for Hard Puzzle. I hope no solution is ever published. I hope that anyone who solves it will remain silent.

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- Hanon Ondricek (United States), November 19, 2015


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