So, I need to build a hot air balloon. That much is abundantly clear. It’s not a stated requirement of the next Rite, which just asks me to reach Delos Island somehow, but I’ve received so many conversational nudges from NPCs that it’s pretty obvious how I have to get there.<\/p>\n
This is the point where I got stuck when I was playing as a Fighter, and the reason I started over as a Wizard. Over the course of that second play-through (actually third, because I started over as a Fighter first), I found some more objects that are probably balloon components, but I’m still stymied as to putting it all together. So I may start playing a Thief soon, hoping that the new NPCs — such as the local Thieves’ Guild representative — will give me better hints.<\/p>\n
There’s actually one other option I’m considering. I’ve established that some of the tests, at least, are skippable. If I just go to the inn and sleep for a few days, maybe Elsa will make her way to Delos and win this portion of the Rite, and I won’t have to. Then I can finish the game, and then go back and look at what resources I didn’t use. Those will be the ones I need for the puzzle I didn’t solve.<\/p>\n
This approach has served me well in other adventure games with similar structures. Spellcasting 301<\/em>, for example, which also consists of a series of time-limited competitive tests. Or, more notably, one of the harder parts of Beyond Zork<\/em> — not a competitive-test-based game, but similar to QfG5<\/em> in that it’s an Adventure\/RPG hybrid — was a series of puzzles to find the Pheehelm, an artifact that boosts its wearer’s intelligence. I was unable to figure that part out, but I knew that the only reason you really needed the Pheehelm was that you needed that intelligence boost to use a certain other item. So I started over with a new character, putting as many points into Intelligence as I could from the start, hoping that I wouldn’t need the Pheehelm as a result. It worked, and after I had won the game that way, I knew exactly what items I needed to solve the bits I skipped, which made it all much easier.<\/p>\n I think there’s a general principle to be gleaned here: being able to skip puzzles and come back to them later is a good thing. If I can solve something that I formerly found unsolvable, I feel very clever. By contrast, if I can’t skip a puzzle and have to resort to a walkthrough to see the rest of the game, I feel stupid, and, being unwilling to admit that I am stupid, I blame the author. This is really just the old argument in favor of nonlinearity, but what we have in this game is a peculiar sort of semilinearity that works just as well, and perhaps better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, I need to build a hot air balloon. That much is abundantly clear. It’s not a stated requirement of the next Rite, which just asks me to reach Delos Island somehow, but I’ve received so many conversational nudges from NPCs that it’s pretty obvious how I have to get there. This is the point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[201,197,198],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-rpg","tag-beyond-zork","tag-quest-for-glory","tag-quest-for-glory-v"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3725,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/3725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}