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Cancer Cure, the Game, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I sometimes forget about pure puzzle IFs. I do a range of paper puzzles, but tend to be biased to think of IF as narrative, and so scratch different itches. Which is kind of wild, because ‘classic’ IF are so much more puzzle than narrative. Is the narrative framework, however rich or thin, really that important to the experience? Intellectually, shouldn’t have to be, but emotionally I guess it is for me. We are a species of storytellers and some of our most popular media suggests the stories don’t need to be that sophisticated or even novel. Sick burn, culture!
Now, I do like logic puzzles, but the ones that engage me are ones that jump straight to application of deduction and/or knowledge. It is a fair point that no-rules puzzles do in fact require this, they just require the additional prerequisite step of discovering the rules as you go. Puzzles don’t need frameworks of wordplay, trivia knowledge, spatial cues. Nor do they demand hint systems, either buried in clues and prompts or to the side as a reference for the stuck. Cure for cancer is famously a puzzle with no clues, prompts or hint system.
So what does this have to do with Tower? The game is a no clues/no rules/no hints puzzle. You need to divine the rules from literally nothing but experimentation. Like cancer research! It also seems to change its rules with every level (of the tower, presumedly?) It seems to deliberately provide no fail feedback other than the fact of the fail, meaning it becomes a guess-the-verb, guess-the-rules exercise. Your enjoyment will depend directly on 1) how energizing you find that sort of thing and 2) how mentally nimble you are to not drive into a mental cul-de-sac of ‘no idea what’s left to try.’
I can’t tell if the game is buggy or just obstinate in that it doesn’t always give you immediate feedback even with success. For review purposes, I am treating both those cases as Bug - either coding or psychological. In an early notable instance I left a room where I tried something to no apparent success, only to return later and see, “Wow, I guess it did work after all.” Objects have names you recognize, but don’t really behave like their real world counterparts. Autonomous objects disappear from your sight, rather than move through observable space. Reasonably expected functions of everyday objects don’t work. To the point where their names are just familiar sequences of letters whose behavior is its own puzzle. Continued failure is frustrating, and achieving brute force solutions to seemingly arbitrary puzzles provides more “sure, I guess” than cathartic rush.
If opaque, experimentation-type puzzles are your jam I would recommend you join the fight against cancer! If your schedule doesn’t allow that, Tower is for you. For me, a narrative justification would be one way to increase engagement. Medical research isn’t motivated by the super-opaque trial-and-error puzzle solving. Its getting the cure! Narratively, maybe it could be getting the treasure. Or freedom! Love Interest! Magical Rune that apocalyptically eliminates selfishness from the range of human behavior! Another way would be to craft clues/hints/experiment feedback to learn more than simple fact of success-or-fail with each experiment. Without either of those, its too Mechanical an exercise for me.
Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 3 floors complete.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? Doubtful, not my kind of puzzle
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless