Hard Puzzle 4: The Ballad of Bob and Cheryl

Hard Puzzle 4 is a highly enjoyable text game, if approached with the right mindset. On the surface it may look like a buggy, half-implemented shambles, but don’t let that fool you: It really is a buggy, half-implemented shambles.

It’s also a masterfully crafted puzzlebox that keeps opening up in fresh and surprising ways, and requires you to step out of the box on more than one occasion. Don’t expect a great story, but prepare for lateral thinking exercises, shocking discoveries, and intricate exploitable flaws.

The game encourages you to cheat. Be sure to check out the so called walkthrough, and follow the instructions in the help command. There are similarities with Serhii Mozhaiskyi’s I. A. G. Alpha, but this game takes it up a notch. There came a time when I felt that it was probably expected of me to harvest the Glulx strings for clues. I did so, and found encrypted data and a message from the author, berating me for peeking.

Going for a deliberately crappy aesthetic is obviously a risky move, but for me personally, defeating this puzzlebox was one of the highlights of IFComp 2019.

The Hard Puzzle games have always been odd-balls. They tend to be extremely fussy sandboxes with mechanics you can use over and over and whose solutions require enormous leaps of intuition, endless experimentation with absolutely everything, or just dumb luck.

This game honors that legacy by having many, many sandbox commands and requiring some outrageous leaps of intuition. I had solved some of the previous Hard Puzzles by decompiling them, and this game has some good-natured nods to people who 'cheat' at games like that.

This differs from the other Hard Puzzles, though, in that it can be solved piece by piece, instead of an all-at-once lightning bolt thought like the former ones.

I won by cheating in three different ways (including (Spoiler - click to show)'decompiling', the intfiction forums, and decompiling).