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3 people found the following review helpful:
by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)
Related reviews: one-trick pony, palindrome, wordplay, They Might Be Giants, based on songs, easy puzzles
A bite-sized wordplay piece that should take under five minutes to play. Fictional content is slight, surreal and entirely in service to the wordplay.
Most puzzles have a trick to them, a satisfying moment in which you discover how the thing works and can start to make progress. A really good puzzle still requires some ingenuity after you've worked out the trick. In a bad puzzle, all that's left after discovering the trick is brute-forcing or other kinds of tedious slog. By that standard, this isn't really good, nor is it bad; it swiftly delivers that single gleeful moment, and after that everything else is trivial.
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Molly, June 26, 2012 - Reply
This is a stupid/pointless thing to point out months after a review, but... Is the title of this review supposed to be a failed palindrome? I just noticed it recently and it's still bugging me.
This is a stupid/pointless thing to point out months after a review, but... Is the title of this review supposed to be a failed palindrome? I just noticed it recently and it's still bugging me.
Sam Kabo Ashwell, June 26, 2012 - Reply
It's meant to be a palindrome, but, ah, apparently I'm in the unconscious habit of thinking of articles and demonstratives as being in a sense included in the noun. (Sort of the inverse of Russell on denotation: specific descriptions are really just expanded names.) This makes sense in certain quarters of philosophy and in coding, where the question is really about the identity of the noun; but of course that consideration's irrelevant to palindromes! So yes, a mistake on my part.
It's meant to be a palindrome, but, ah, apparently I'm in the unconscious habit of thinking of articles and demonstratives as being in a sense included in the noun. (Sort of the inverse of Russell on denotation: specific descriptions are really just expanded names.) This makes sense in certain quarters of philosophy and in coding, where the question is really about the identity of the noun; but of course that consideration's irrelevant to palindromes! So yes, a mistake on my part.
Emily Short, April 11, 2012 - Reply
I also found myself wishing that it provided more helpful responses to a couple of attempts I thought were right-thinking but turned out to be on the wrong track: (Spoiler - click to show)VIEW CANYON VIEW and I TAKE I, the latter meant to mean TAKE INVENTORY by abbreviation. I didn't realize at first that my commands needed to be palindromic with the rest of the room description, and so spent a lot of erroneous commands flailing around that way. I was a little bit disappointed when I realized what the trick was, because it meant there was a lot less invention/solving required to do the rest of the rooms.
Previous | << 1 >> | NextI also found myself wishing that it provided more helpful responses to a couple of attempts I thought were right-thinking but turned out to be on the wrong track: (Spoiler - click to show)VIEW CANYON VIEW and I TAKE I, the latter meant to mean TAKE INVENTORY by abbreviation. I didn't realize at first that my commands needed to be palindromic with the rest of the room description, and so spent a lot of erroneous commands flailing around that way. I was a little bit disappointed when I realized what the trick was, because it meant there was a lot less invention/solving required to do the rest of the rooms.
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