![]() I don’t think these issues are insoluble. With a bunch of polish, they could perform their storytelling function without being unnecessarily onerous for the player. The puzzles are much of the substance of the story, not a pointless gating mechanism. The puzzles are necessary to the story being told: it’s important that the protagonist has to work hard to rescue these kids, and important that they all have to club together to get things done. To be clear, this isn’t a case of a good story being held up by some ill-thought-out puzzles. There’s even a puzzle that might be construed as a maze. After enough iterations it just becomes really frustrating. For the first couple times you have to deal with all this, it feels realistic and sort of significant, having to manage the connections between people. And some students insist on carrying particular objects, so they can only hold a maximum of one hand. You can’t carry stuff yourself, and the students will only follow you if they’re holding your hand or the hand of another student who’s holding your hand, so you spend a lot of time telling students what to pick up or drop or give to another student or put in a knapsack. There’s inventory juggling, only it’s exponentially more irritating because it’s combined with a fiddly hand-holding mechanic. ![]() There’s a puzzle that fakes you out, where you think you have what you need, but actually you don’t, and the real solution is somewhere else entirely. There are puzzles where you have to repeat a command that has previously failed several times in order to succeed. Puzzles can be partially solved, but still need an object from another location that the player hasn’t seen and about which she has no information yet. Large objects have to be pushed around, laboriously, through many rooms. OOOF breaks this rule over and over again. Once the player has figured out HOW to solve the puzzle, she should not have to spend more than a move or two executing the solution. While the player is trying to solve a puzzle, she should get plenty of feedback about failed solution attempts. In execution, many of them break one of my fundamental rules about puzzle design:Ī puzzle should continue to be engaging from the moment the player encounters it until the moment it’s solved. Conceptually they’re fair enough, if not mostly what I would call inspired. Most of the puzzles involve physical manipulation of objects - pushing things with sticks, dragging things around, climbing and stacking things, and so on. These facts affect how he feels and even (in small ways) how he relates to the students. The protagonist also gets a few touches of personality: he is gay, married to a husband who is currently likely to be in danger. The kids and their space are sympathetically drawn, and although they have various quirks that are mildly frustrating (the better to provide puzzles), they come across as endearing and also as having distinct personalities from one another. This is a premise I found compelling: the stakes are high, the protagonist is acting nobly, and the situation is about as bad as it can get. To make things worse, the teacher has himself been gassed, and cannot manipulate things properly, so most steps require asking the kids to do the physical manipulation. ![]() Some students are frightened, some wounded, some have more frustrating or kid-like reasons not to want to leave where they are, so the puzzles chiefly revolve around helping the kids get out. He has to find six of his students and help them get out of the severely damaged, burning school building. Ollie Ollie Oxen Free begins with the protagonist, a teacher, coming to in the moments after his school has been bombed. ![]() It’s one of the longer games I’ve played in this comp, and may take the full two hours (or more, especially if one resists the urge to check walkthrough and hints). Ollie Ollie Oxen Free is a parser-based true-to-life game about surviving a disaster.
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