Zarf Updates

My ThinkyCon 2025 talk is now posted!

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

• The talk in text form (link)
• The slides by themselves (PDF, 13 Mb)
• The recorded video from November 6th (via ThinkyCon's Youtube channel)

The video includes a couple of audience questions, but it also includes me saying "um" a lot. Take your pick, take your chances.

I'm on the schedule for ThinkyCon 2025!

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

• Me!
• Thursday, November 6th
• 4:00 - 4:30 pm (Eastern time)

What does it mean to take a puzzle to the next level? In Hadean Lands (parser IF, 2014) I designed a game where every solved puzzle "collapses" to become a single move in a larger puzzle. And larger still, and so on... Other games have taken a similar tack, notably Baba Is You.

What does it mean for a game to "scale up" in this way? Is it different from the familiar concept of the metapuzzle? (Spoiler: yes.) What kinds of puzzles are amenable to this scaling idea? And why is it so awesome, anyway?

ThinkyCon is a free online three-day event for and by puzzle game developers. There's lots of other great speakers, including FLEB, Patrick Traynor, and Tonda Ros. I hope you can drop in.

IFComp 2025 has wrapped, and the results are posted! Congratulations to Detritus (Ben Jackson) and all the other entrants that did well.

Now let's talk survey.

The post-Comp feedback survey is live. (As linked from this official post.) Jacqueline, our organizer, writes:

This year’s survey is a little more important than usual, as we’re seeking thoughts on the future of how we address the UK Online Safety Act, how much generative artificial intelligence should be allowed in the competition, whether or not you’d like us to continue the awards livestream, and highlighting some important new volunteer roles for those who are interested. Please check it out! We need all of your thoughts in one place, so even if you’ve expressed opinions [on the forum], or in Discord, or emailed us, we will look for your thoughts in that survey.

Really? I'm going to blog about a movie which will shortly be known only as Jared Leto's last stop before oblivion?

(I wrote that before checking wikipedia. Apparently Leto has been cast as Skeletor in 2026. Good for him. Rock that bonehead.)

Tron is back. I am big fan and cannot deny. When the Tron: Legacy trailer dropped in 2009, I blogged it. I've written up two recent Tron games, Identity and Catalyst. Both games exist because Disney wanted to keep the franchise awake. They let indie studio Bithell Games run with that ball; to good effect, I thought. But the movies are the tentpole, and what the heck, I have a few thoughts.

Back when I was a kid, after I solved an Infocom game, I'd print out a transcript of a "perfect" playthrough. And, as it happened, I kept this box of printouts through all the moves and decades since.

The box sits right now on my shelf of Preserved Stuff, in between the box of "How to Play IF" postcards and the stack of hand-scribbled adventure game maps from the 90s.

It's a nice memento but very nearly useless. I'm not about to scan in all those pages, and you wouldn't learn much from reading them. Not even about my play style -- as I said, these are optimized, after-the-fact transcripts.

However, a question came up on Jason Dyer's blog about the exact version of Suspended that I played. And I said hey! I could look at the transcript and tell you!

...Actually, I can't. Suspended doesn't print out the release and serial info when you start a transcript. Oh well.

But since I was in there, I snapshotted the start of every transcript. Here they are.

Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job.

This 13-minute video was included on the original 1993 Myst CD-ROM. Because CD-ROMs were enormous, and they had all this free space left over...! The original Quicktime movie data was a whopping 73 megabytes. It looked kinda like this:

Continued from previous post. I finished all of these! Sometimes with hints.

• Strange Antiquities
• Daymare Town
• The House of Tesla

Not summer games, not fall games, but... something of both. (In betweens.) I let the review file accumulate for a few weeks and here we are.

More reviews coming soon! A whole lot of adventure games dropped this month; I'm still in the middle of a few.

I'm also did-not-finishing a few of these games, which is unusual for me. Some of this is general world stress. I am pretty distracted with all the terrible things. Some of it is just saying, hey, I'm not having fun with this part, I'm allowed to put it down. Doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad. Or even that I don't recommend it!

• no signal
• Neyyah
• The Siege and the Sandfox

The problem with Bloom and Rage is that I never played Life is Strange. Or I played maybe one chapter of the first LiS, didn't get hooked, and put it aside.

B&R isn't exactly a response to LiS. It's the devs of the first two LiS games stepping off that franchise to create an original title. Which means it's intentionally trying to attract an audience who knows what they want, and I don't know what that is. Of course they also want new players -- they want me to enjoy it from a standing start -- and I did. It's a great game. But I'm a bit disoriented trying to write about B&R. I don't know how it fits in. Or what it fits into.

Then again, B&R is about four teenagers who don't fit in, and then they find a hole in the universe. So maybe disorientation in the right frame of mind.

Here's a bit of trivia from the Infocom source code collection.

All modern parser-IF tools let you type X as an abbreviation for EXAMINE. It's such a familiar shortcut that we forget that most Infocom games didn't work that way.

Back when we played Zork, you had to type out EXAMINE:

Although L was a supported abbreviation for LOOK, so you could save a couple of keystrokes in a goofy way:

This came up in a forum thread. When did Infocom adopt the X abbreviation? Hey, I keep the source code collection handy for just these questions. Regex search!