This is only a minor gripe. But in a game that has so far been entirely polished it kind of stood out.
The solutions to the puzzles of getting Clara out of the lift, and getting through to the radio station, simply don’t work in part 3, and there’s no real explanation or clue about that. I spent quite a while fiddling with permutations of them thinking I was stuck!
(Actually my real problem was that I’d failed to pick up the parcel delivery notice in Ransome’s trailer right at the beginning. Eventually I guessed it must exist and where, which is a score on the ‘good design’ side I guess.)
Then part 4 begins and the very first thing I’d tried for both those puzzles turns out to be correct. With the radio station I felt like it wasn’t so bad, though maybe they could have had an answering machine, since they weren’t asking for callers yet, but the Clara thing got to me.
Anyway, compared to the kinds of horrendous arbitrary unfairness you often see in the genre this is nothing! I know I’m preaching to the choir here but… what a superb game.
Right. Although in my playthrough she likes “I Love My Cat”
I tried all the channels, suspecting she’d have a favourite show (which she does, but she only tells you after you give her the cake in part 4). It turns out you can’t brute-force it.
That’s interesting - I didn’t realise that was a variable. It was Hospital Hi-jinx in mine.
I came across a similar thing when I was trying to help my hubby. I gave him a hint about Clara and the TV but it turned out it was too early to do that bit (I think he hadn’t got the tickets to Thimblecon yet). So that confused him even more, heh.
I can understand the confusion. At the beginning of part 3 (and maybe until its end?) Franklin doesn’t already have the “visit the penthouse” task in his task list so he doesn’t need to get Clara out of the elevator, yet. But the players who suspected in part 3 that she had a favorite TV show and tried to change the TV channel can be actually misled, when they observe that Clara doesn’t react.
That part is OK - I got a living person to the penthouse before getting Thimblecon tickets. I think it’s just dependent either on the chapter starting, or possibly Clara having cake. I don’t have a savegame to go back and try though… will try later if I play through a second time.
Franklin does have the “visit the penthouse” task in his list for most of Part 3 (at least in terms of duration in my game - admittedly this might have been because I was fixating on the wrong thing), which threw me off quite a bit.
Yes, it happened to me when I recently replayed the game. I already knew what to do so I was surprised that the action was actually possible before Clara talked about her favourite show, and it didn’t have any consequences (I can turn the TV on, she does not seem interested in any of the shows). The problem is that from that moment on you could put that particular solution out of your mind.
Anyway this seems to me one of the most common issues I ever experimented in adventure games.
I mean I got used to it so I retry an action in different moments, 'cause I think that something could have unblocked its result.
That’s generally true, but it’s also true that this specific game eventually helps the player to take again that solution under consideration, because Clara explicitly tells the player that she has a favorite TV show. After an explicit statement like this one, the player should feel enough motivated to try the solution again.
Yes, and actually I had no problem in finding the solution
I was wondering about the difficulty that joelglut found about this puzzle.
Pretty much all the puzzles in TWP sounds very logical to me, included this.
I suppose when you change the TV to the correct channel, Clara could say something about how much she loves that show but she’s too busy right now to come and watch, or something like that.
Yeah, I suppose there are lots of things that might be possible, but in any case, it’s new corner case conditions you have to add checks for, and I’m sure there are lots of minor things like this. I think in this puzzle, it’s pretty clear Clara doesn’t like Franklin, and wants nothing to do with him, until he befriends her with the cake offering. Perhaps that’s the logical element here. It seems the cases of getting stuck on this puzzle are related re-playing the game, rather than playing it from scratch, where the progression makes logical sense.
Yes, unless someone has a big intuition, like @joelgluth had. In this case the real issue is not getting stuck but observing a behavior that (later) the player classifies as irrational or out-of-character.
Yes, that makes sense. I missed that he said that:
I can’t think of a clean ‘fix’ that wouldn’t require additional voice dialogs being recorded, I see your point. I think it’s logical though, because Clara really dislikes Franklin until the cake, and so it makes sense she wouldn’t join him to watch the show, even if her favorite show was on.
If you want a fix which just makes their behaviour/world more believable (but without really helping the player) you could do this by changing the direction in which Clara faces:
At first she faces the ‘camera’ like it is now (opposite direction from elevator door)
After giving her the cake she turns to the right, facing Franklin (because now she likes him).
This could explain why she won’t notice the TV at first. But we probably also need to add an additional trigger so that she sees the TV even when opening the door from inside the elevator. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense again.
Problem is you would need to record one additional line.
Also we’d have to explain why he won’t turn it on yet but is OK with it later.
He still needs to be able to operate the other TVs in the hotel rooms because a) why not and b) he can already get to the hotel guest to frighten him.
Yes, that’s a solution but by “simple” I meant a solution that didn’t require to call back the actors or other artists, which would increase the costs and require a lot of time to make the change.
I imagine that my definition of “simple solution” would be: “something that can be accomplished just by scripting and using the existing resources”.
