A Beauty Cold and Austere

I will tackle this review by sharing my experience with this game, because I played it, gave up on it in frustration, came back, and gave up again for a totally different reason. Before giving up, I became quite enamored with it. So there's totally a love-hate thing going on. Quite appropriate, isn't it, for a "cold, austere beauty".

This is also something that I make a point of doing in my reviews. There are usually, and this game is no exception, reviews already out there that are excellently objective. I also sometimes try to objectively review the game, or parts of it, but with such great reviewers as have come before - shoulders of giants, and all that - I think the only way to say something that's still relevant is to share my experience. If this is not something that appeals to you, well, you've been warned. Bwahahaha, and all that.

First off, the math that I picked up in school was pretty basic; I went into arts, into acting, into music. I always did find math to be fun, in a crossword-puzzle type of way. I mean the equations that we were given to solve. I mean the stuff that people usually say "that's not the good part of math, that's the drudgy part of math that people are right to hate". I liked it. It had rules; you applied the rules, and solved the equation. Much like a game.

I also may enjoy some puzzles, especially basic cryptography (simple letter substitution, the kind that Poe's "Gold Bug" popularised), but they are definitely not what I play IF/adventure games for. I grew up with the LucasArts and Sierra adventure games, and when I discovered IF, it was the Babels and Anchorheads of this world that spoke to me. My favourite "aHA" moment was when figuring out the elevator puzzle in Hollywood Hijinx. The puzzles where you put yourself in that game world, with those objects and inventory items, and you think, "how can I manipulate these to achieve my goals?"

Finally, I am keen to learn, within reason. I like occasionally following Wikipedia links that explain some sort of mathematical problem or paradox or something.

I am, in short, the layman with a few basic notions.

Reading the about text, I was left with the impression I would be the target audience for this game! (more so if I liked mathematical puzzles more, but ah well) And indeed, the game tickled my fancy immensely, at first. It made certain things very visual, very accessible. The royal road that doesn't lead to geometry, our pal Achilles, the growing lines in the axis, the way that we gather the information via our math book. I felt like I was being given a teaser of a world which, though not my own, was beginning to interest me.

Let's let that sink in for a second. This cold, austere beauty captured my heart. Surely that means that the game was doing something really great. I particularly enjoyed the responsive implementation; the game was working with me, and not against me or at cross purposes.

Then I came to the prime numbers puzzle. My brain froze. I hate that kind of thing. I sighed, turned to the hints, and solved it that way. Even as I did, I thought to myself, huh, this was quite logical and sensible. If I'd given this some thought, I might have been able to solve it.

Then I came to the scales. It is a puzzle with three scales, each scale with two pans, each one with multiple blocks.

I was already soaking up a lot of new information. And these scales puzzles, I'm honestly so, so tired of them. My brain froze again - terminally, this time. I played around with them, I read the hints, and in the end I decided, ok, this is not for me. "This beauty is cold and austere indeed", I thought. "There's no point in forcing. I like a different sort of beauty. This is good for what it is; but it is not for me."

I deleted the game. It was nighttime, so I started up another game "A Bloody Life", played a few rooms, then went to sleep.

And I kept thinking about this game. It kept me awake for a little while. I kid you not. I kept going over it, and going over what I had liked, and telling myself that I had done the right thing by quitting if I wasn't having fun. But still, you know, I couldn't let go.

So next day - after a mostly sleepless night, for some reason - the first thing I do is, download the game again. I decide I'm going to give it a proper try. It's not hard, I think, to open a text file and write down the equations on the scales. The hints told me what the overall goal was, and told me that (Spoiler - click to show)the non-lettered blocks all weighed the same (which is something the game itself had already hinted at), so I figured all that was left was the equation part. This is the bit I used to like in school, I told myself, so give it a go.

It was... embarassingly easy, as it turns out.

And fun!

From then on, I kept going. There was one more place I couldn't understand - the chest in the hidden room (I shan't spoilerize any more). I just couldn't really understand what I was meant to do; there were dials that said one thing, and there was an inscription that said another, and I didn't know which of those two I was supposed to "solve". The built-in hint system solved that for me. I still don't quite know the logic, but I am quite content to accept that it's a puzzle that just flew over my head. I still got the logic of the final solution, just not quite WHY that was the solution. No matter! I was still avoiding hints overall, and having a lot more fun this time! The game was throwing lots of new stuff at me, and I was consulting my little book and making headway as best I could. I was glimpsing, at a very basic and introductory level, a fascinating world. And I was actually understanding it, up to a point. Euclide's fifth postulate, Pascal's Triangle, the secretary problem, I didn't know about ANY of these things. The things I recognised the most were, heh, Achilles and the Tortoise (thanks to Terry Pratchett's Discworld and to Beyond Zork, mostly!), and Plato's Cavern, which is the one thing I recognised from school.

...you can tell there's a "but" coming on, can't you?

It's the TRON sequence. The Euler thing.

I hate these. I always have.

Look, I tried it. I understand that it's really simple, really basic. Laugh at me if you will. Make fun. Call me a moron. Whatever. I not only hate these puzzles, I absolutely suck at them. Very hard.

So I try it, I map it, I experiment, and eventually I give up. Cue the hints.

...the hints don't give a solution.

They give a couple of tactical pointers.

Huh. Ok, I guess; let's try putting them to good use. Let's try the puzzle again with those pointers in mind.

...nope. Still nothing. Yes, I'm THAT bad at this type of puzzle. Remember the type of player that I am; this is exactly the sort of thing I hate in my adventure gaming experience. Consider also all the puzzles that I had to solve to get to this point; I had been putting an effort, and I had felt the game kept rewarding my efforts, so I kept wanting to go on. It was all very positive.

So I sigh, come here to IFBD and check the "detailed solution" that's linked here.

The "detailed solution" doesn't give me an answer either.

And this pisses me off.

This. Pisses. Me. Off.

Excuse me, author?, goes my internal monologue. You make a detailed solution - detailed solution! - and you don't bother to give a solution to the puzzle that's stomping me? What, did you think it's beneath you? Did you think anyone could solve this easily with just a few pointers? Am I that useless and hopeless a player? Do you care so little about me as a player? Should I just quit and let others, who "get" you, play this game instead, seeing as I am not worthy?

Like I said, I was pissed off. I feel at this point it's better to be blunt about how I felt when I saw that, well, the "detailed solution" didn't detail the solution to a puzzle that I was stuck on. I feel that this is the sort of feedback that sometimes lacks: an honest depiction of how the player feels when encountering certain situations. Not destructive, not inflammatory, not insulting; but no holding back. Because, hey, the player felt that way because of your game; and the player was certainly not holding back when they felt it. Surely, author, it will interest you to know the reaction you caused.

So, I was still fuming when I checked the other available walkthrough, which DID have a solution. I could have continued. But... I didn't want to anymore. If the author was going to snub me that hard, to have so much contempt for me, then this was no longer a game I wanted to play. So I deleted - this time for real.

Long read, this. Or maybe a rant. I see it as candidly sharing my experience, my thought, my feelings.

This game is good. It's really good. It really captured me. It must have; I came back to it after giving up once, and even now I still think fondly on it, so much so that I needed to come and write this review, to serve as final punctuation, so I can move on. The imagery, the implementation, the way that it was mostly accessible to someone who has somewhat basic knowledge and was keen to learn.

But there are certain things I cannot get past. Different things at different times. I can accept a lot of things, and others I absolutely cannot. It may not sound like a big deal - but I hope that, through my rant, I was able to explain why it was such a huge deal. When we are really enjoying something, the bad things stand out all the more; and I was loving this, up until my progress was completely stopped by a puzzle that wasn't for me and an author who decided not to give me a solution so I could move on.

Well, if you don't want me to move on, author (goes my internal monologue), I shall oblige.

Moral of the story: it's possibly not really about which type of player is suitable for the experience. It's much more about how accessible the author makes it.