Delightful Wallpaper

This was a very, very tough game, which took me at least 6 hours to complete. I'm not a regular player of IF so that might have been the problem. I had enjoyed Plotkin's previous games but this one was like having my teeth pulled out.

The prose and the settings are exquisite, as per the usual with Plotkin, despite this being (Spoiler - click to show)a very dark comedy, much darker than his other IF (at least the ones I've played).

There appear to be no clues for this game anywhere on the internet, except for the walkthrough which doesn't actually reveal anything. So to save the next poor soul who tries this game a bit of time, here are some clues that would have helped me.

Part 1
* (Spoiler - click to show)Read the notebook very very carefully, it will tell you what you missed.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Make a map and note what each passage does after you discover it.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Don't waste your time trying to open the front door, that'll come only at the end of part 1.
* (Spoiler - click to show)The key to the rest of the game is the northern hallway, find out how to go up.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Note what the notebook says about moving the bridge, there are 2 ways to do it.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Just crossing the bridge FROM a side tower TO the central tower unlocks doors, permanently. Each side tower unlocks its own door(s). The text which says it happens is very easy to miss, and it's not really obvious even from the notes (except "by tower bridge". It doesn't say you have to cross it, I thought it was enough to rotate it). Realizing this would have saved me hours.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Note the direction of the arrow in the Dining Room.

Part 2
* (Spoiler - click to show)You PUT intents ON people. You can't DROP intent on people, you get a confusing reply. This had me stuck for something like 2 hours.
* (Spoiler - click to show)In the kitchen, examine each of the drinks on the tray separately.
* (Spoiler - click to show)Don't use 2 intents on the same person. This makes the game unwinnable (sort of, since you can take back any intent). Consult the notes on what to do.
* (Spoiler - click to show)There are apparently multiple uses for each intent that deviate from what the notebook says, but I didn't care enough for the game to try them.

I liked the easter egg where (Spoiler - click to show)you walk around the house and see the Viscount romanticizing all adult members of the family, both male and female. Other than that I could care less about multiple endings and just about had enough of this game.

My interpretation of it: (Spoiler - click to show)You play as Death and/or an author of a murder mystery, where everyone dies at the end. In the first part, the House (manor) where this takes place actually tries to fight you to prevent its inhabitants from being killed.

This very much reminded me of Groover's game The Bat, they have very similar, uh, sensibilities: (Spoiler - click to show)Both the inky black humor and the discrete, period-appropriate references to outrageous sex acts (The Bat of course came out 8 years after Delightful Wallpaper.) The Bat however is much easier and also fun to play ((Spoiler - click to show)if a bit gross). All in all they're not very different in spirit. I thought Wallpaper is very well researched as well as The Bat was, especially the references to (Spoiler - click to show)Edward Gorey, complete with the little horror poems about death.
I think if Wallpaper had been a bit more clued then I would've enjoyed it even more than The Bat.

Oooh boy. This one was.. A doozy. At the start, I was incredibly pumped for this. You’ll notice that I said “at the start”, and that’s because it took a lot of mechanical reasoning to navigate, although once you got the idea, you could kinda get around.

Very beautiful in the end- multiple multiple endings. There’s a way to get softlocked a bit, but other than that, there’s a unique note system that helps you remember things. I loved the notes. Very much. A lot of colour-specific things. Very ethereal. Intentions are so cool.

We play as a ghost… puzzle master… thing. A notion, perhaps? Overall, a lovely game focused on puzzles with emotional mechanics and (an) interesting ending(s).

Also, there’s a walkthrough. That’s awesome.

I’d rate this as a 3.5/5. Mostly because of the repetitive nature of the navigation puzzles- timed/move based puzzles or mechanics are great for solving the puzzles, but after the solvation (it’s a word), imo it’s a better idea to just let us navigate easier and keep the locks on.

Would I play it again? Yep. Would I play it for endings? Yep. Actually, we’ll up it to a 4, simply because the mechanics were awesome in the endgame.

What new can one say about a game that's been reviewed ten times already? Not much, perhaps, but Delightful Wallpaper is such a delight that perhaps reviewing it will bring it to other folks' attentions.

The most important thing to know about Delightful Wallpaper is that it is two games in one. The first game is basically a shorter version of Inside the Facility. (Well, Delightful Wallpaper predates Inside the Facility by ten years, so perhaps it's more accurate to say that Inside the Facility is a longer version of the first half of Delightful Wallpaper.) The puzzles all revolve around movement: Visiting certain locations or traversing certain passages triggers various doors to open or close in the mansion. You must learn and keep track of these in order to figure out how to reach all of the rooms. It's a logical puzzlefest of the kind I particularly enjoy.

You're assisted greatly by the fact that the game keeps "notes" for you that you can review. If something interesting happens when you visit a room or traverse a passage, the game records it in your list of notes, perhaps along with a question mark. When you discover what that particular action did, the game updates that entry in the notes. It makes the puzzles much easier than they would be otherwise: You don't have to worry about having missed something important in the text. It also means that the game records some solutions in your notes before you've completely figured out what's happening. I have a mixed opinion on the notes: I think they make what would likely be a fiendishly difficult game into something much more reasonable, but they also tilt the game a little too far to the easy side for my taste. However, I appreciate the challenge the author faces here, and I also can't think of a better solution for hitting the difficulty level "sweet spot" than the one the author has chosen.

The second game is very different. You have to collect "intentions" (these are sort of like motivations or actions different characters can take) and place them around the mansion. You're essentially creating a narrative for the characters. You don't have complete control of the narrative, though: There's a definite end state for each of the characters, and there are plenty of restrictions on which intentions you can place where. All in all, the second half of Delightful Wallpaper plays like a story that you're writing. It's interactive, in the sense that there are choices that you make for the characters, but you're not actually one of the characters. Instead, you're more like an author, deciding what each character does. While I think different interpretations are possible here, I felt like I was (Spoiler - click to show)Agatha Christie writing a sequel to And Then There Were None.

If I could have one wish about the second half, it would be to include a puzzle where you must put the intentions in a particular logical order in order to make the narrative work. In retrospect, the set of intention placements that I came up with did result in a narrative that made logical sense, but I would have liked to have seen the intentions constructed such that this was a bit harder to do.

So, what we have here are two games in one. And the games are very different. They're like two classic IF archetypes: the logical puzzlefest to be solved and the interactive story to be written. I suppose you could also say that in Delightful Wallpaper the opposing sides of Graham Nelson's "narrative at war with a crossword" description of IF have declared a cease-fire, with each side agreeing to take half of the game.

All in all, a delight to play.