For those who've completed the game, what was the hardest puzzle?

Thank you. The doubt was killing me. Man, so many hours wandering around because of my beep pulse

Finding the secret meeting was also the hardest for me as well, and in relation to that charging the battery.

I had already given the radioactive waste to the man eating plant, which then had eaten the shopkeeper.
Fantastic! But it kept me from thinking I could do something else with it.

I also thought the navigatorā€™s head was crucial to solving the puzzle.

And I thought there had to be a way to charge the battery with the loose electricity cables in the sewer, which kept me busy for hours.

Eventually I looked for a hint on a website which gave subtle hints instead of a walkthrough. It said: 'What do all the people do that walk into the wood?"
And then I saw it and then I got the answer.

That was the only hint I got.

Another hard one was the final step with the trampoline. It took me a lot of time to find out I just had to click the page on the right time.

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I did not know this! I must try it now. Thanks!

During a pool party, a friend of mine was quite drunk and started calling people by their home phone number instead their name. It was quite fun, since it was already in the days where everyone had mobile phones and nobody called home anymore.

Spoilers ahead, obviously. I finished the game a few hours ago, and this is my first post.

I survived the ā€œmonkey wrenchā€ in MI2, so this game was a breeze by comparison. :wink: My family didnā€™t have the Internet back then because we lived in the middle of nowhere and the ISP was a long distance number, so I played that game for quite literally months without access to a hint guide. It was brutal, and as many of you know, you often had to resort to pixel-hunting and brute-forcing. Once youā€™d get past a puzzle, you would solve a whole bunch of them immediately because you knew every detail of the game by that point and it was obvious where the next piece fell into place.

I didnā€™t back Broken Age because I wasnā€™t sure how Kickstarter was going to pan out. I wanted to lay low and play it safe. That game failed in my eyes to deliver on its promise, so when Thimbleweed Park was announced, I figured that backing games on Kickstarter was a bad idea and passed on it. I think I was both right and wrong at the same time.

I bought Thimbleweed Park on GOG at full price, and it took me 19 hours and 24 minutes to complete. A great value considering a movie theater ticket costs as much and movies are generally 3 hours or less. That said, at least four of those hours was because I overlooked two items: the book at the Occult Bookstore and the Math Trophy in Deloresā€™ bedroom. For the book, I just plainly didnā€™t see it even though itā€™s glowing.

As for the math trophy, thatā€™s one of those items early in the game that if you donā€™t pick it up during your first encounter with it, then youā€™re unlikely to go back for it. I try to pick up everything during my first encounter, and for some reason I never tried it on the math trophy. When things got tough, I never thought to expand my search to her bedroom because I was sure I had tried picking up everything there. But then things turned desperate, so I went through the entire game using the Pick Up verb on EVERYTHING with all the characters. I just KNEW those radiation puddles and trail-head puddles were related, and it was just a matter of finding the right vessel to transport it in. A trophy as a vessel? groan Once I found it, I immediately knew what to use it with, and then very quickly beat the game from that point on since Iā€™d solved so many other puzzles in the mean time. I had already turned on 3 out of 4 locks to the pillow factory, and when I saw that electric fence, I didnā€™t hesitate to try charging the battery. Using all the characters to pull the door open was obvious to me since it was in everybodyā€™s TODO lists, and it reminded me of everybody meeting at the dock in MI1 and getting on the boat to travel to Monkey Island together. It seemed like the one moment where the characters would converge onto a single place. As for the remaining puzzles, Iā€™d read the books to disarm the factory robots and solve the text adventure a dozen times looking for clues, so once I encountered those puzzles they were DOA. And when an adventure game locks you in a building or room, it narrows things down and lets you focus which I really love but it also tends to be the shortest part of the game.

That last paragraph might seem a little critical at first reading, but let me tell you why itā€™s not: I love that feeling when you get stuck for hours, and then thereā€™s a huge breakthough and the game unravels in a single sitting. Youā€™re in the ā€œzoneā€ and everything starts falling into place very quickly. Youā€™ve mapped so much of the game in your head from being stumped and when you finally get a new inventory item, you just KNOW where it goes and what to do next. And then that opens up a new area of the game, and things just start falling into place over and over again. I think I spent less than 2 hours to complete the game after getting the math trophy.

I had not experienced that kind of a high since the heyday of graphic adventure games. It truly made me feel like a kid again. GREAT stuff.

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Iā€™m glad that you enjoyed the game and that it felt to you as an old-school PnC adventure game.

Iā€™m curious to know what do you mean by ā€œsolve the text adventureā€. How did you ā€œsolveā€ it?

The red gel decoder and hint guide tells you to go west, look around, examine the light, and then enter FIZZSCUMM into the computer. I likely missed out on some dialog choices by not experimenting, but frankly, I was ready to finish the game.

I understand, thanks. :slight_smile: I thought you were talking about ā€œcompletingā€ the text adventure, not about how to crash the machine.

This was me! I donā€™t remember if I tried picking it up when you first control Delores in her flashback, but I do know that I didnā€™t get it in the ā€œpresent dayā€ at first. The only reason I found you could pick it up was after I got stuck at a certain point and went EVERYWHERE trying to interact with objects again. Once I got it, I quickly thought about using it to collect the radioactive waste, but after that I had no idea what to do with it.

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To me the solution to the toxic ooze puzzle came because the trophy was described as being made of rare-ish earth metals (titanium and pewter).

When that description came up during the :delores: flashback, I immediately thought that the trophy would be used in some sort of chemical application. I originally thought for the ink, but that wasnā€™t the case.

Eventually, when I came across the toxic ooze, the rare metals trophy was the first thing that popped into my head.

So I donā€™t think it was all that random. That said, I can see how one coulda as that if the chemical connection is not made.

dZ.

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That one took me a long time too. When I realised I could zap doors, I felt pretty silly :slight_smile:

Other things: I totally missed the package slip in Ransomeā€™s starting location, and the key hanging in Chuckā€™s workshop. Both of those cost me a lot of timeā€¦ eventually the first occurred to me as something that just had to exist (I was pleased when it did) and the second I spotted on about my fifth bout of wandering the mansion looking for anything Iā€™d missed, because I was stuck.

The only other puzzle that took me a while was the forest, but not because I didnā€™t understand the probable solution - I couldnā€™t figure out what to carry the waste in! Another ā€œfailing to pick up an item in a characterā€™s starting roomā€ moment, I made a bit of a habit of that, looking back. It was nice to be right about the solution when I eventually did go back and notice the math trophy.

What if I told you that there actually IS a way to complete and solve the text adventure and that is reveals the secret of monkey island and the plot of monkey island 3a?

I would immediately believe you. It seems to me an extremely probable event to happen.

Goodā€¦IĀ“m not telling though, mind you!

Doloresā€™ flashback became fairly clear to me once I realised that the stamp on the letter wasnā€™t cancelled, and that I could put a cup of water in the microwave, but it would be offset to one side, leaving an empty spot. Iā€™ve seen enough old movies to know that particular trick, and the rest of the flashback leading up to that was just pointed guessing in the direction of what Iā€™d assumed Iā€™d have to do. I remember thinking, ā€œif I hadnā€™t had exactly that idea IMMEDIATELY, I would probably have been stuck there for the rest of my lifeā€. And, indeed, a friend (who recommended this game to me, and was responsible for introducing me to point-and-click during one of his bi-annual Monkey Island playthroughs) bought the game at the same time as I did, challenged me to a no-walkthrough first-play race, and is STILL STUCK THERE, bless his soul. Chalk it up to my having a father in the postal service, I guess.

The two parts that got me COMPLETELY stuck were right after each other, which took me almost a month to get through.

First, I couldnā€™t figure out how to get Thimble-Con '87 to start for the LIFE of me. I knew that Iā€™d have to get in there to get to the lawyer to have him come 'round to read the will, and I knew that the only thing I could think of that I hadnā€™t done (aside from the bits that are meant to solve puzzles in the next part, but how was I to know they were red herrings until then?) was to find the last joke book page. Like many others, Iā€™d only been required to use Push/Pull 2-3 times prior, so I was constantly looking for another place to jump from. I was pulling hair out sending Ransome up the radio tower time after time, subconsciously redirecting his exclamations of ā€œbleep you for making me do thisā€ at the game itself. I was quite disappointed in myself when it turned out to be as ā€œeasyā€ as it was.

Immediately after, I got as far as I could without getting Clara out of the elevator because it hadnā€™t occurred to me to chill the cake. Iā€™d finally dissolved once again into trying every verb with every noun, when in the middle of freezing the fountain for the umpteenth time I let my head hit the desk and carried on my way.

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Itā€™s easy. Find the chainsaw and use it to reach the sekrit room.

Shhhhhhh, Ron didnĀ“t pay us off for nothing, remember?

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I was stuck with Ryker. I didnt realize you could zap open the door. I thought you had to do smthg while he was up there in the room (except from finding out where his room is). And the reason was: otherwise you could have short circuited the puzzle of getting the burger and sending him.up his room by just brute force searching all rooms with Franklin.

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The first time I went through that puzzle, I brought EVERYONE up there to see if they would go in while the door is open. After even Ransome wouldnā€™t go in there, I finally figured I had to do something else. :slight_smile:

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Me too!

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