Thinky Stream: Wilderplace, Dis Pontibus 2

9 thoughts on “Thinky Stream: Wilderplace, Dis Pontibus 2”

1. I missed your stream unfortunately but wanted to say that Wilderplace looks lovely and really intriguing. Will try and watch the past stream to see how it plays!

   Congrats too on kicking off the Thinky Games Twitch channel, while also avoiding coughing. That’s amazing to me right now *cough cough*. I feel like Bob Fleming at the moment.

2. No worries, Gregg. People have lives and not everyone can afford to sit around and watch me play puzzle games on a Saturday morning! That reminds me I should put up a post about the new YouTube archive.

3. So, I kind of have a question about Wilderplace. Is it… not getting off the ground very much? I went to post a question on Steam and I was the first person ever to have posted a question in the Discussion section, and this just makes me feel like maybe I’m in the wrong place?

   Also (this was the question) I’m not sure but I may have locked my game? I went to a grove with a monument and in reaching the monument I blocked the way I came in, but there was another exit to another grove, except I’d left that grove in a state where the other exits are blocked, and now I can’t do anything but move back and forth between those groves and resetting them just puts them back in the state they were in when I entered, with the entrances/exits blocked.

4. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an empty forum for a game so that was quite surprising to me last night when I looked, particularly for puzzlers where there’s usually a few questions to be asked.

   Ah, well you’ve voiced one of my early thoughts/worries: if I have to navigate through previous groves to access other parts of the map, what about the groves that I well and truly gummed up? (I might have done the same at a monument, the Scribe possibly? It was quite a tight space.) I saw there was a reset option on returning to balanced groves, so assumed that would address the problem but… apparently not?

   I did a grove last night, The Fen VI, and it took 465 moves to clear. Granted, a lot of that was moving around as I eyeball the axes, count squares and mull over routes and obstructions. I retried 5 times, and most of those were after I moved one too many times and got myself stuck. I’m starting to feel like unlimited undos would be preferable. I appreciate that you could end up undoing inside a ‘stuck’ situation, but I feel like recognising that is part of the puzzle. You can mess about in stuck situations [em]without[/em] undos. The reset button is always there and I think any self-reflecting ‘thinky’ player will want to reset the board if things start getting messy and too far off base.

   Next time I fire it up, I’m going to go through some old wilderplaces to hunt down those unfinished ? groves on the map, see if I can run into your issue!

   I must say that I’m still really enjoying this and the dialogue has made me laugh a few times now. I’ll see if I can identify some of my favourite groves so far in a future comment. The Fen VI was a real head-scratcher and the solution felt like something I was discovering as I played rather than thought through fully. It didn’t feel like a hollow guessed victory, but it didn’t quite have the same thrill as seeing the solution then going for it. I felt like I muddled through it.

5. Yeah it was the Monument to the Scribe that got me. I entered from the southwest, early in the Fungal Forest or whatever, and I tried exiting to the southeast which is Stone Quarry X, the first grove in which you use the pyre that stops time. And not only had my solution there involved locking the door behind me, but it seems as though using a pyre turns it into an obstacle, so there’s absolutely no way to leave the way I initially came in from the northeast. I’m pretty sure I had to block off the southwest exit too (there was a snake in the corner with a stone spirit and I had to maneuver something so I could create a rock behind me, in a square surrounded by neutral obstacles and/or mushroom trees that I don’t have a power to deal with yet).

   The insult added to injury is that the Scribe reveals the number of moves spent in each grove and I don’t even want to know that.

   As far as I can tell the reset just restores the grove to the state it was in the last time you entered it, which is not helpful when pingponging between two stuck groves like this, unless there’s an option that’s different from just R? I would also like to grumble that the WESD control scheme is unusual even before we get to some of the weirdnesses about holding the keys down longer, that makes it easy to hit R accidentally, and you can’t undo resets. I guess I could remap R but that’s what reset should be!

   Also someone sat in their car with the engine running for over an hour last night and they just came out and started it again and I’m beginning to feel like I need to take steps.

6. Being driven to self-harm (logging back into Twitter)

7. Yeah I don’t remember the specifics in the Scribe grove but I distinctly recall thinking ‘uh oh, I suppose I’ll not be going back that way!’ because of the way I’d solved it.

   I’ve been playing on a controller so I can press a shoulder button to move without releasing the spirits which I’ve found more consistent than the hold method.

   Yeah, the Scribe’s ability is a weird one because this doesn’t feel like the sort of game where I’ll be returning to groves to optimise them. I’ve no doubt I can do better than 465 moves on The Fen VI but I’ll be damned if I’m unpacking all that! Did I get the italics right that time? 🙂

   Good luck with the engine person!

8. A tow truck finally came and took away the car which I think was not revving at that moment. The two people and dog who had been in it got into a pickup truck and drove away as well, but not before one of them came back and retrieved what seemed to be a box of cereal. I’m a bit concerned that maybe they were running the car to keep warm but I don’t know if I can square this with the pickup truck? I feel like the world owes me an explanation here.

   This reminds me of when someone was BLASTING BBC World in a parked car across the street and eventually I went over and banged on their window to tell them to turn it down. They were in the front seat in an awkward position where I’m not entirely sure they weren’t having sex with someone? I really don’t understand how sex in the front seat of a car would work anyway, I’ve never played GTA.

   I remain stuck in Wilderplace.

9. Sorry for not catching up with this. I gravitated towards Stereo Boy as I felt like I could complete that quickly while Wilderplace might be a longer haul – progress was slowing. I’ll be going back to Wilderplace soon. I noticed it seemed possible to lock out exits but I assumed this wasn’t going to be a problem in the long run, that the team had foreseen this.

   I guess I’ll find out.