My thoughts on the secret thingies (very, very spoilerific)

[mauro7inf]

I've got to say, as a whole-hearted fan of La-Mulana and Tunic, I expected this game to fall into the same kind of nook: lots of puzzles with difficult solutions. But I was a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, almost all the way to the True Ending, I thought this was absolutely magnificent. It's after the True Ending that the trouble really begins.

So I like puzzle hunts. They're lots of fun. La-Mulana is basically a puzzle hunt; you get a bunch of hints in different places and have to try to figure out what the hints mean and what they refer to, etc. But here's the thing: you *get* hints. If you're fairly observant, if you whip every wall, you'll find the hints, and you'll know where you need to make progress eventually even if you don't know how to make progress there *now*. In Animal Well, the bunnies are not hinted at all, for the most part. One of them is even unsolvable without looking it up online, because if you're trying to do it blind, you're not going to look up the solution to the mural puzzle to find out that actually it's an ARG. I think that makes the bunnies *unfair*. They simply aren't fair puzzles, and for something that's such a big part of the game, I think the bunny puzzles *should* be fair.

Some of them are fine. The duck bunny was a fantastic puzzle. The hint is quite fair. You see a famous ambiguous picture -- and yeah, that's external knowledge, but I think that's fair in a puzzle-hunt-type game -- and are given the notes to play. Simple. There's obviously the first bunny you see, which is very visible so you just need to get to it from the other side, which is not hard at all once you get the BB Wand (though I've since seen videos of how to use the regular B wand to go up indefinitely). The 8 crows that make a song, that's cute and quite fair; you should be able to recognize that the pattern repeats. The faces on the TV in the house, very fair. But. The face in the ghost? It's way too fast to see. The bunny in your dreams? Takes way too long for it to pop up and there's no indication that you should get up in those couple of seconds and catch it. If it appeared much earlier, say, after 60 seconds, and stayed on the screen for much longer, it would have made more sense.

So what could be done instead? I don't know. If there were hints for the bunnies, or even just descriptive names, I think they would be more fair. The bunny from that un-remote-able wall in the dog area, for example, has been referred to as "the floor is lava bunny". Knowing that, I was able to piece together what I actually had to do. It was really hard, took me probably about an hour, but I did it! Then I watched FuryForged, and he did something pretty different. I'm proud of myself for getting that, and I think that in-game hints would ensure that players actually get to feel this pride. I would not have been proud if I'd just read or watched the solution then tried to reproduce it. The origami bunny was an extremely interesting puzzle, but my computer does not have a printer installed, so I never got the computer in the office to become interactive. It wasn't until I watched the video that I understood what was happening, installed a virtual printer, and the computer became interactive and able to print to my virtual printer. I was able to just copy the image onto a sheet of paper with a pencil to solve the puzzle, which, again, was really cool, but how the hell was I supposed to know that I had to download a virtual printer? The grass barcode that's supposed to also encode the numbers, well, my barcode reader couldn't read it. It doesn't appear to be the standard barcode format. So what if... there were a Barcode Bunny? Now I know that I need to find a barcode somewhere in the world. Or a riddle about access to a printer or something. The thing is, the puzzles are really cool, but you can't tell that they're there. Finally, the bud bunny... It's very clever, but I don't think it's fair to expect people to know that they should start a new game and hear a different jingle, which they then need to map to notes -- easy for an ear-trained musician, not so much for the non-musical normies.

Furthermore, a lot of the time, and this bleeds into the non-bunny puzzles as well, you need to do all of something exactly right or else it doesn't work at all. For example, you need to play the ENTIRE 64-note egg song. If you do it wrong, nothing happens at all. So you don't know: did you do it wrong, or did you do it in the wrong place? One possibility: getting one row of eggs has some effect. Like, maybe the row starts glowing. And then when you do the second row, it doesn't work. So you know that playing the eggs is right, but something about what you did was wrong. This happened to me in the bunny meta as well; I messed up two of the bunnies' directions, so my manticore didn't get to the temple. OK, I guess we can move on to something else. I watched a bit of the video for a hint, and... nope, I was right; I just had the execution wrong. I double-checked my directions, fixed the mistakes, and I made it. (The BDTP puzzle is a very cool puzzle, by the way.) This game just doesn't give partial credit, so you don't know if you're making progress or not.

So yeah, what would help? Hints for the bunnies, like, solid hints. And an egg detector that you'd get maybe when you have 56 eggs for your last 8. Maybe a bunny detector too once you've gotten the first 8, who knows. I think that would make sure that players going in blind will still be able to experience the puzzles.

I think that the fact that Layer 4 is so damn hidden is absolutely fine. That stuff's meant to be in the dark. I think the bunnies aren't.

[Linck]

You've put into words exactly how I feel about the game. I completely agree with you, I wonder how many people feel the same

I've played the normal game and reached the end, collected all the eggs, and found 8 bunnies on my own. Then I stopped playing the game because I felt like it was not worth my time anymore. I would probably have figured out more stuff if I kept playing, but what was one finding every half an hour, would now star becoming one every 8 hours, and it would keep growing and maybe I would get stuck at one point. Obviously I would have never figured out the mural puzzle on my own. The game made me fiddle with that thing a stare at the mural and my piece for probably more than an hour, completely wasting my time.

Don't get me wrong, I think the normal game and the eggs are worth playing, but the bunnies and beyond, not so sure

You've said something about external knowledge. I also don't like puzzle games that require you to have external knowledge. Even very basic external knowledge. People have gaps in their basic knowledge. No human will ever know all the basic knowledge there is to know, and thus, they will get stuck and never solve the puzzle that requires it.

[Calculus]

Originally posted by Linck:

You've put into words exactly how I feel about the game. I completely agree with you, I wonder how many people feel the same

I've played the normal game and reached the end, collected all the eggs, and found 8 bunnies on my own. Then I stopped playing the game because I felt like it was not worth my time anymore. I would probably have figured out more stuff if I kept playing, but what was one finding every half an hour, would now star becoming one every 8 hours, and it would keep growing and maybe I would get stuck at one point. Obviously I would have never figured out the mural puzzle on my own. The game made me fiddle with that thing a stare at the mural and my piece for probably more than an hour, completely wasting my time.

Don't get me wrong, I think the normal game and the eggs are worth playing, but the bunnies and beyond, not so sure

You've said something about external knowledge. I also don't like puzzle games that require you to have external knowledge. Even very basic external knowledge. People have gaps in their basic knowledge. No human will ever know all the basic knowledge there is to know, and thus, they will get stuck and never solve the puzzle that requires it.

Personally i hate the idea of a mural puzzle. it is designed to not figure it on your own because each player gets a different square that is a small part of the whole picture, so you are forced into looking it up online

[lordatog]

Originally posted by Linck:

You've put into words exactly how I feel about the game. I completely agree with you, I wonder how many people feel the same

I've played the normal game and reached the end, collected all the eggs, and found 8 bunnies on my own. Then I stopped playing the game because I felt like it was not worth my time anymore. I would probably have figured out more stuff if I kept playing, but what was one finding every half an hour, would now star becoming one every 8 hours, and it would keep growing and maybe I would get stuck at one point. Obviously I would have never figured out the mural puzzle on my own. The game made me fiddle with that thing a stare at the mural and my piece for probably more than an hour, completely wasting my time.

Don't get me wrong, I think the normal game and the eggs are worth playing, but the bunnies and beyond, not so sure

You've said something about external knowledge. I also don't like puzzle games that require you to have external knowledge. Even very basic external knowledge. People have gaps in their basic knowledge. No human will ever know all the basic knowledge there is to know, and thus, they will get stuck and never solve the puzzle that requires it.

This is pretty much where I was when I gave up, too. That said, I don't think that's a bad thing. There's a clear intention that the game gets more and more convoluted and less solvable on your own as you go deeper. Reaching the credits is straightforward. Getting all of the eggs is much trickier and demands that you scour every inch of the game. Getting all of the bunnies is a community effort. Getting the final secrets afterwards isn't really intended to be possible at all.

And I love all of this. I love that anyone can push as far as they want into it as they can, and then stop where they want to. Would you be happier if everything after the second ending didn't exist? Because then everything would be solvable within the game, no problem, but the game would undeniably be lesser for it.

[Linck]

Originally posted by lordatog:

Would you be happier if everything after the second ending didn't exist?

I think I would be happier if the game was explicit about what you're able to figure out by yourself. It wouldn't need to do it in writing. I'm sure you could design some clever ways to convey that to the player without leaving any doubt

[KapKaboomz]

Originally posted by author:

Or a riddle about access to a printer or something. The thing is, the puzzles are really cool, but you can't tell that they're there. Finally, the bud bunny... It's very clever, but I don't think it's fair to expect people to know that they should start a new game and hear a different jingle, which they then need to map to notes -- easy for an ear-trained musician, not so much for the non-musical normies

Just look at the direction that they pop out of, no music ear required.

also all yall complain too much

[ElectricGrandpa]

I do wish there was a bit more signposting/hints, but my sense is that the "layer 3" puzzles (bunnies and beyond) aren't really meant to all be done by people individually... They're meant to be more community stuff that people discuss and share etc.

[mauro7inf]

> my sense is that the "layer 3" puzzles (bunnies and beyond) aren't really meant to all be done by people individually... They're meant to be more community stuff that people discuss and share etc.

I think the Layer 4 puzzles -- the so-called Wingdings Ending -- really aren't meant to be found by people individually, but I think the bunnies *are*, except when they aren't. One of the bunnies (that I'd kind of forgotten about) requires you to go to a specific room, turn on the UV wand, look at the triangles on the wall, and realize that this is a flute melody. Excuse me, but... why would this be difficult to figure out? If you're thorough enough about searching with the UV light, you'll see this and get an easy bunny out of it. A slightly harder but still quite figure-out-able puzzle is the duck bunny; you can easily put together the clues to realize what the melody is (because at the end of the game you see a room with the key and it's pretty obvious) and that it has something to do with a bunny, but then you have to go figure out where you play the melody, and when you stare at the image and realize that it's also a duck, you remember where there was a duck -- it's a pretty obvious and non-hidden animal, being, what is it, one screen right from the main room? So a bunch of the bunnies are findable, with interesting puzzles to puzzle out.

And then you have a few bunnies that you have very little hope of solving without a specific clue. Everything points to the fact that looking things up is essentially cheating, so you don't want to go on the internet and get the answers. And you CAN'T solve the puzzle without looking the answer up on the internet. I think this is the problem here. There's no community of people working together to solve the bunnies. There are just guides that will give you the answer, or if you're lucky, they'll give you hints so you can solve the rest of the puzzle yourself. In doing this, you lose the joy of solving them yourself.

> Would you be happier if everything after the second ending didn't exist?

No, I love the bunnies, and I appreciate the fact that there's a fourth ending after the third. I just think that the bunnies should have better hints and should be findable without a guide. I think the intention was for the bunnies to be a community effort, but community efforts are only interesting for the first handful of people that engage in them; once the discovery is done, it's no longer a community effort; it's just looking it up in a guide. That's why what I actually think would be nice here are hints that make finding the bunnies more fair and not need to be looked up.

And how could the internet bunny be fixed? Actually, I think this is simple: every time you go into the room downstairs, or maybe every time you die or reload the game or save or something, a random puzzle piece gets displayed. How could the spike bunny be fixed? Same as the animals in Super Metroid: teach the player how to get on the frisbee while throwing it by having an animal, well, do the same thing. How could the bar code bunny be fixed? Make the stupid bar code actually work with my phone bar code scanner, and also make the grass a few pixels longer to make it more clear. How could the floor is lava bunny be fixed? Same as the spike bunny: tutorialize the mechanic somehow in a similar situation. Actually, this wouldn't be too hard to do. Set up the same scenario, with two opposite-phase block walls, have no remote toggle, have a switch that needs to be flipped while on a bubble going down to the water (like the one on the left side of the map), and basically force the player to jump in the water to respawn at the now-open block wall to get a chest. Then, when you see the same situation in the dog area, you know what you basically have to do and it's up to you to figure out how (which was a very fun challenge, by the way). The vine bunny puzzle can be fixed by simply knowing which room to look at, or by having one of the arrows easily visible. Then you know there's something there, and the challenge is figuring out what mechanic you can use to see beyond the vines. The dream bunny could be fixed by having the dreaming happen much sooner and stay on screen for longer. There's no indication that getting up will not make the bunny immediately disappear, so this should be figure-out-able. The bud bunny could be fixed by letting you close and reopen the bud. The ghost face bunny could fixed by having the face rotate more slowly (I had to take a slow-mo video on my phone). I'm not sure about the origami bunny. Maybe using the computer should be possible on PC and there should be a beep and a speech bubble from the computer saying "Printer not found". The Switch version maybe could put a picture of the sheets into the screenshots folder without telling the user or something.

Anyway. I'm saying this because I think the bunnies could be made to actually be fair but still quite challenging puzzles, and the bunny meta, the BDTP, is a fantastic puzzle that players shouldn't miss out on. Because that's the other thing. The game tells you through that puzzle, clearly, that you need to get all 16 bunnies, which you basically can't without a guide. I think that's unfair, but it's very close to being absolutely awesome. Like, the 16 bunnies are clearly parts of a whole, so if you haven't gotten them all, you haven't finished this part of the game. This is unlike Layer 4, which is crazy and secretive and only for the truly insane. Layer 3 should be very hard but doable without a guide, much like, I guess, all of the secret stuff in Tunic that the manual gives explicit hints for. Layer 4 is best kept hidden DEEP under the ocean.

[VirgateSpy]

I think this game suffers a problem that each of the "secret" puzzles feel too disconnected from each other. They're completely different, so it's hard to recognize that you're even looking at a puzzle, and solving one, more often than not, is not going to help you solve another one.
The only thing they all share really is playing notes on the flute. (And this also gets broken on one of the very last puzzles, where instead of notes, they are directions to move in, which can be very frustrating).

Something that I think FEZ, Tunic, and ESA for example do really well is to make you progressively understand better how the secret system works, and then applying those same rules consistently (keyword) in different scenarios (also some better designed signposting, but that's a bit more dubjective), only deviating from that for the reaaaaally extra stuff.
Not to mention in Animal Well many of the puzzles aren't even hard, it's more of a question of even seeing something there.

[SZATURN]

I think it comes down to nostalgia. I see the game as an attempt at re-creating the experience of being a kid playing an arcade paltformer with no context or not being able to read or comprehend the manual for a platformer at home. If you didn't do that as a kid or you came to this game with higher expectations you'll likely be disappointed.

[Oiolosse]

I feel like op. The game have a good design is only that the third and four layers aren't for my style.

1 - normal game for normal user
2 - Eggs for hardcore gamers (us)
3 - bunnies for reddit mad gamers hehe
4 - codes for weirds ITs like author.

Well, I enjoyed it and You can give him the goty for the first two layers. It's hilarious, full of mystery, it pushes you like Celeste. But I watched a couple of bunnies and it was too much for me so I decided to watch it on YouTube and I'm definitely glad I didn't go there. Ok, I made them today and it took a while, but I didn't go through the hoops of discovering for myself every totem, every mystery, every song, it's just too much for me. The fourth layer is great but I'm not the objective type of person who would enjoy it. I think this doesn't make the game any less great, but it does leave us with a bad taste in our mouths of thinking that they left us out a bit.

[Lime Cultivist]

I loved the post-games of ESA, tunic, etc, but after the eggs I just completely lost interest in this one. The main game was great though (even if it was only 4 hours long)

[D3f4ult]

just want to know how to print to pdf. I've tried to use microsoft print to pdf but it not works.[\spoiler]

[The HR Department]

Can the mural puzzle be solved by doing multiple runs? Like, you don't necessarily have to collaborate with other players to solve it?

[Goblin]

Originally posted by The HR Department:

Can the mural puzzle be solved by doing multiple runs? Like, you don't necessarily have to collaborate with other players to solve it?

Even if it theoretically could be (not sure, would assume yes), practically not really.
You have to get to 32 eggs to unlock the top, and you need the top to get to the mural picture. You also need the remote to get to the toppable soil. So you'd have to speedrun 32 eggs and the remote at least 50 times, except you wouldn't be guaranteed to get one of each part of the mural - you might get duplicates.
You'd generally need to do a few hundred rolls to have decent odds of seeing all of them - it's a % chance that you see them all at X number of runs. At 214 runs you'd have 50/50 odds of having them all. To get to 99% odds you need 420 runs (ayy). But if you're particularly unlucky it'd take many more - it could go over a thousand, it's just very unlikely.

[Nyu]

Originally posted by mauro7inf:

I've got to say, as a whole-hearted fan of La-Mulana and Tunic,

i stopped at that line of your post.
i alreay know you looked at guides playing Lamulana