Last Writes by orangeoceans
A sound-based puzzle game. Play here or on itch: https://orangeoceans.itch.io/last-writes
By Spiral Tower Ludogenics, a game dev affiliation.
Controls
WASD/Arrows for movement, E to interact
(Cheat button: . or ` or ~ key skips the room)
Extended excerpt available here.
Walkthrough
- Unite
- !> Walk to the panel where the two flashing beacons match in frequency
- Synchronization
- !> Press E on the panel where the flashing beacon matches the beeps in frequency (4th from the left)
- Warehouse
- !> Press E on the panel where the flashing beacon matches the beeps in frequency (7th from the left)
- Dial Tone
- !> Press E where the two lights match in frequency (3rd from the top, 5th from the left)
- Chorus
- !> Press E where the two tones match in frequency (4th from the top, 3rd from the left)
- Beat Frequency
- !> Press E where the two tones' beat frequency matches the flashing beacon (One tile down and left from the beacon)
- Left to Right
- !> Press E on the panel corresponding to the higher tone in sequence (Third panel out of the four)
- Faith
- !> Same as Left to Right, but this time with a false hazard panel
- Ode One Out
- !> Listen for the off-tune note in the Ode to Joy sequence (11th tone), and match the rhythm to the flashing beacon (3rd row down)
- CDEFG
- !> From the bottom to the top, go through the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th gaps, corresponding to the rising notes
- CEDFE
- !> From the bottom to the top, go through the 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 4th, and 3rd gaps, corresponding to the background notes
- Elysium
- !> From the bottom to the top, go through the 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd gaps, corresponding to the first 8 notes of Ode to Joy
- Doppler
- !> The pitch increases as you approach the target, and decreases as you move away from the target. The target is at the 3rd tile from the right, 3rd tile down
- Dowsing
- !> Same as Doppler, but with some obstacles. The target is at the 2nd tile from the right, 2nd tile down
- Feuertrunken
- !> Same as Doppler, but with Ode to Joy instead of a single tone. Follow the same path as Elysium to the target at 3 tiles from the right, 9 tiles from the bottom
- Two Koreas
- !> Listen for direction words in the weather forecast. Go south
- Destination
- !> Listen for direction words in the recording. Go North, West, North, East, North, East, North, West
Predestination
- !> Listen for numbers in the recording, and take the tiles corresponding to each number, counting from the left. The correct sequence is 2, 4, 2, 4, 7, 7, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6
Cardinality
- !> Two recordings play simultaneously. One is a weather forecast containing directions, the other one contains numbers. First, go East, East, East, South, South, West, West. Then, in the next section, take tiles corresponding to the numbers 1, 4, 4, 4, 1, 4, 4, 1
Angelology
- !> You just have to keep going up. You will fail this if you lost any lives before this room.
| Itch.io | https://orangeoceans.itch.io/last-writes |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/last-writes |
Ratings
| Overall | 66th | 4.12⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 291th | 3.587⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 21th | 4.326⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 10th | 4.63⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 186th | 4.207⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 101th | 4.054⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 105th | 4.196⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 78🗨️ |
WHAT THE FUCK
10/10
interesting gameplay, unique and fun. Gooooood job!
@drainkid It's a good point. Tuning the difficulty of the puzzles and the number of lives was a real challenge. Since so many of the puzzles can be brute forced, I decided that giving unlimited lives would blunt the pressure of solving the puzzles, and the impact of the game. In my own experience, I've found that I can appreciate a puzzle even when I have to use a walkthrough!
I wonder how we would balance this if we ever elaborated it into a longer game.
10/10
Plus, you guys have a great logo and team name :D
The lives are meant to discourage brute forcing, yes, since all of the levels can be brute forced. When playtesting I found that without lives, players would simply stop paying attention and flail around until they got through the level.
We've talked a lot internally about if we should add checkpoints. I decided against it, for reasons relevant to the ending of the game (spoilers!). Once you know the solutions (or read the walkthrough), the game is actually quite short, so I felt that not including checkpoints was an ok tradeoff to keep the narrative cohesive.
I felt the cheat button was a reasonable compromise to players' naturally shorter attention spans during a game jam, as it's explicitly posed as a cheat and doesn't affect the game structure as such.
I do totally get why you made this choice though. You're right that the puzzles can be brute-forced quite easily, but I think that's a much better problem to have in this case. With how difficult the puzzles are, it just adds further frustration that doesn't need to be there and encourages the player to completely rely on the walkthrough. In both cases, I might end up cheating my way through the puzzles, and not really engaging with it. It's a really tough problem that there's no right answer to, so that's just my opinion. One solution to this could be keeping the system you currently have, but randomizing the solution to each puzzle in some way. This would make it harder, but I think less frustrating because you are not simply redoing past work. This would have been much more difficult to implement within the jam's timeframe though.
Sorry about the long ramble, I did really love your game! The puzzles were truly brilliant, I've never seen anything like them, that's why I care so much!
I was terrible at solving video game puzzles as a child, to the extent that I played most of Zelda Wind Waker with a walkthrough by my side. Maybe my expectations are colored by this experience. Was my appreciation of the game worsened by how easily I gave up and cheated? I'm not sure. I think I enjoyed it just as much, but then again I had no counterfactual.
On a more meta level, I prefer a cheat button or a walkthrough for a short form game like this because it's explicitly portrayed as a cheat, i.e. almost extrinsic to the game experience, whereas the frustration is perhaps an intended, intrinsic part of the game. In other words, maybe it lets players bypass parts of the game they don't like, even though those parts have a reason to be in the game.
We do want to elaborate this game more, into a 2-ish hour experience maybe, which will require rethinking this approach. I don't think it would make sense to include a cheat button in a full Steam release!
Your randomization idea gave me an interesting idea. Maybe some of the more tutorial-like levels could be adjusted to not damage the player at all, allowing for experimentation or brute-forcing, but these are bookended by more challenging boss levels that test if the players truly understood the puzzles. Then we could randomize the tutorial-like levels to encourage even more experimentation if players fail at the boss levels.
But @orangeoceans had a particular vision regarding sparse player amenities which she felt was integral to the game. While I disagree with this part (we are both very opinionated designers; there were heated arguments over this issue behind the scenes) I think the game couldn't have materialised in the specific way it has without it. I also have to admit it actually worked better than I initially expected, based on the responses here. So I'm both tantalised and delighted by the outcome here (typical of jams), which I'm excited to find has also been the gameplay experience with a lot of the players.
Thank you, everyone, for playing, and giving so much valuable feedback!
On one hand, I really appreciated the spoilers so I didn't get stopped halfway through from my failures, and the cheat key so I could see the final scene. If I were five or six levels deep and ate a game over, I would not replay, so the cheating helped me experience. On the other hand, I am a person who is a bit defective in the ear and it was an accomplishment for me to solve Ode One Out without looking it up. So I did try each puzzle before using the guide. Struck a good balance w the out-of-game hidden-spoiler. Hitting Alt-Tab was a confession.
Really well done, with a core idea deeply rooted in the theme, and taken in an interesting novel direction and backed up with art that both looked compelling and was very well suited to the experience.
Great job!
edit: love the discussion above -- cocreator had a strong vision, I disagreed but tried it their way, worked better than I expected. That's cool teamwork. I've always compoed so I can be unilateral, and thought of team operations as hardmode. Cool to see some of the curtain pulled back, thanks.
I have to say i still gave on the game since I games like this are not my preference (my tone regocnising seems to be bad). It really is good but i am just not a puzzle player :D. If this was a full game i think the hint system could be one used in some games where you give a easier version of the puzzle as a hint.
You guys did a really great job in such a short time and put together a very polished game.
Thank you for offering the option to skip around - it was truly impressive to see the sheer amount of puzzles, and all of the thought that went into the creation of each one.
Added it to a collection and will definitely beat it proper. Rating it for now, though. Impressive work!
Edit: made it!!!