>X TICKET
Century Park Invites You To…
The Party of the Century!
Wear White and Bring a Sense of Hope for the Future!
>
Well. that explains how we could pick out the stranger in black from the crowd so easily.
Huh… Going back it says the jigsaw peice is “currently this way up” can we rotate or flip it?
>ROTATE JIGSAW PIECE
You turn the piece clockwise, to:
11:57 PM
>
Well that did SOMETHING all right
Might as well rotate it fully around
Well, it’s 11:58 PM now, but nothing seems to have happened.
>
I really don’t have any clue … Go check out that night-jar perhaps?
>E
Century Park
Lasers suddenly strobe magnificently over your head.
>NE
Churchyard
A night-jar flutters from perch to perch along an old iron fence.
>x night-jar
A bird akin to the swift.
The clocks, amplified by an unbelievable mass of electronics, begin to chime the hour…
11:59 PM
>
I doubt there’s much we could do in a turn or so … Try to get the night-jar why not
>GET NIGHT-JAR
Unfortunately you have nothing suitable to catch the bird with: no wicker-work cage, for instance.
Bong! Bong! Bong!
>
OK what it sounds like we actually could catch the bird somehow… Or it’s a red herring
Well… If we haven’t failed the puzzle yet can we try to check out the croud again?
>SW
Century Park
The chimes reach midnight! You rush to join the happy throng, your petty investigations forgotten as the new century begins.
You have succumbed to the party
In that game you scored 4 out of a possible 100, in 46 turns, giving you the rank of Partygoer.
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
>
Not bad for a first try! We managed to solve most of the puzzles. Given a second shot, I’m sure we could complete it. Perfect run and commentary coming soon.
This is my new favorite quote.
Also… we solved puzzles? Yay?
So as we saw with the game over message, we have 45 turns in which to complete the Prologue, each turn being 20 seconds long.
Let’s begin.
Century Park
>X ticket
Century Park Invites You To…
The Party of the Century!
Wear White and Bring a Sense of Hope for the Future!
There is a huge cheer from the distant centre of the crowd.
>E
Beer Tent
Sticking out of an unpleasant baked potato is a sparkler, still fizzing away.
The canvas flutters slightly and you can just make out that figure in black rushing away back to the park. It must be that tantalising stranger again - who else would be wearing black at this party?
>get sparkler
Taken.
>W
Century Park
Somebody (and you have a pretty good idea who) seems to have dropped, of all things, a jigsaw piece here.
>get piece
Taken.
Lasers suddenly strobe magnificently over your head.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
All this is fairly simple. If you just follow the obvious instructions you’ll get this far.
>SE
Behind Beer Tent
Mingled amongst the beer crates is a wooden packing box, broached at the top.
Discarded beside the old box is an empty rucksack.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
>get sack
Taken.
>x crate
An old tea-chest of a box, open-topped, the variety which once swung ashore on ropes in East India Docks in the great Victorian heyday. Branded on one side is “A.4”.
>get key
Taken.
>get device
Taken.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
>x sack
It looks oddly like a rucksack you once took with you to Paris on holiday, but perhaps all rucksacks look that way.
The sack is fairly important, but it’s worth noting this description is a reference to Nelson’s earlier game Curses, and implies the main character is the same between both. One could develop an elaborate canon out of this, if you liked.
>x device
A highly curious device, like a wood-mounted gimballed compass, with dials and swinging arrows, inscribed “tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis”. The main feature is a white button. The easiest arrow to read points to 99.
“Times change, and we change with the times.”
>x key
The label on the tag is in some east European language.
>NW
Century Park
Lasers suddenly strobe magnificently over your head.
>NE
Churchyard
A night-jar flutters from perch to perch along an old iron fence.
This is almost certainly the European Nightjar, which is a songbird of the Nightjar family. The most notable thing is that it, and other nightjars, are very difficult to find, being active at twilight and night, and having a ventriloquist effect on their song.
>E
Victorian Chapel
In pride of place is a shocking modern-art statue of a man, and it is a kind of collage. He has an air-raid warden’s helmet, a sickle in one hand, a soldering iron in the other: an old-fashioned cavalry officer’s tunic and a pair of miner’s trousers, then Indian sandals.
>x statue
Written around the base, in large Roman letters, is: “Grad Kaldecki, 1917-95: Inventor, Sculptor, Philanthropist”, and his motto: “felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas”.
“Happy is he who has been able to recognize the causes of things.”
Kaldecki’s self-portrait is interesting to consider.
>E
Vestry
There’s even an old Victorian piano stool, but no sign of a piano.
>x piano stool
An old wheeled piano stool, wide and tall, with a hinged and padded seat.
I wonder how many people are likely to be familiar with how piano stools used to have a compartment in them.
>open stool
You lift the hinged lid.
>get notebook
You can’t see any such thing.
Let’s pretend this was deliberate so that I could talk about parsing text, shall we?
>look in stool
In the piano stool is Emily’s sketch book.
>get sketch book
Taken.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Emily Short is another legend of interactive fiction, and she and Graham Nelson are also married.
>move stool
It rolls a little.
>get pencil
(putting the white party ticket into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
I mean, it’s not like they’d give you a sketchpad without something to sketch with, right? And I’m always dropping things on the floor. Anyways, it’s better than Gabriel Knight 3’s false mustache puzzle.
>W
Victorian Chapel
>W
Churchyard
Let’s sketch this bird. I love sketching.
>sketch night-jar
You sketch in a picture of the night-jar, with a curious sense of deja-vu, and the feeling that drawing such pictures is somehow a worthwhile aim.
It gives me a warm happy glow inside, even if it doesn’t give me any points.
>x pencil
There’s a letter E scratched on one side. Today it would be marked 2B, as it’s a medium soft charcoal pencil, but it looks very old.
Pencils are commonly rated on two scales, the Conte/Thoreau numerical rating, and the European system of uncertain provenance. Conte/Thoreau (the Thoreau in question is the father of the more famous one) dates to the early 19th century, while the European system is dated to the early 20th century (so it is quite appropriate that it is the only one mentioned). The European system has a total of 22 different ratings, only 20 of which are in common use. They range from 10H to 10B. H stands for “hardness”, B for “blackness”- a hard lead leaves a thinner, lighter mark, a black lead leaves a thicker, darker mark. In the middle are “F” and “HB”. Unless you’re an engineer/architect who does a lot of stuff by hand, or an artist, HB pencils are what you have probably used in your life. Pencil leads are also used to test the physical durability of chemical coatings on metal alloys, which is why I’m digressing at length about them.
E probably stands for Emily, here.
>SW
Century Park
>W
There is a sudden roar from the crowd. Five minutes to midnight!
>x monument
A crazy, pyramid-like construction, the height of a small tree, but wide at the base. Walking around it, you see no obvious beginning or end.
That’s an interesting description.
>climb pyramid
Atop the Monument
The anticipated good-view-of-the-party is spoiled somewhat by the perilous nature of the footing - on a sharp triangular wedge of metal. “exegi monumentum aere perennius,” says an inscription. Let’s hope so.
Poking out of the top of the monument is a rickety lightning-conductor.
“I have built a monument more lasting than brass.”
Simple enough. Trees are climbable, and the pyramid is described as fairly short.
>light conductor with sparkler
The fuse wire in the lightning rod begins to burn down. It shrivels away with a disappointing fizzing sound, and then the whole monument is rocked slightly by a bang from within. A little smoke rises from the base.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
And, hell, you get pretty far by trying to light everything you can on fire. Or you could examine the lightning rod and notice the fuse.
>D
Kaldecki’s Monument
The Monument dominates this corner, yet only you seem to have noticed the charred and saw-toothed doorway open in one side.
>enter monument
Corridor in the Monument
A short metal corridor running along the inside of one wall of the pyramid, and sloping slightly inward. The scene out through the south entrance is perfectly, even alarmingly still. The far end turns and opens inside to the east.
Mounted on the inner wall is a glass display case.
>
And with that, we have moved outside of time. Instead, the following legend has appeared on our screen:
6/0/36
Obviously, the first one is the number of points, and the last the number of turns. As for the middle… well, that’s still uncertain.
The Prologue doesn’t really give you much to work with, for reasons I’ll discuss in the commentary, but the “puzzles” are all solvable with a handful of actions. Fairly easy to solve by trial-and-error, and it’s short enough not to be an especial pain to do.
Commentary will get its own post.
PROLOGUE: Commentary
" Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge."
The Tempest, Act II, Scene i.
I don’t usually care about spoilers all that much, but at the same time I feel it would give a lot of the game away to go into much depth about what’s coming up. So this will have to be a combination of annoyingly dry and ineffably vague.
Early adventure/IF games had an annoying habit of engaging in cruel and unusual inventory puzzles. Part of this derived from the absurdity inherent in having a protagonist juggling a few dozen individual items between their hands and pockets. I cannot now recall whether Curses was the first game to implement this concept, but what rescued we poor players from yet another puzzle of trying to figure out what we could throw away safely was the sack. The sack is a bag that has an infinite capacity, and into which we put items when we have no room in our hands. This humble system allows for some inventory puzzles to take place (such as, for example, requiring us to hide certain items in the sack, or taking the bag away briefly) but frees us from the tyranny of unimplemented automatic ones.
Inform 7, the GUI/language Graham Nelson devised for programming IF, has a sack automatically implemented within the basic code.
Rucksack is an older/English term for “backpack”, by the by.
Parsing text is possibly one of the greatest puzzles in any IF game. Figuring out which command will advance things was certainly a major part of my childhood struggles with ADVENT and Scott Adams’s games. Jigsaw is 22 years old, so while better in some respects it’s still struggling a bit. We have made fairly good strides in providing an ability to interpret things closer to natural language and cataloging how our programmed parsers fail to understand particular forms of natural language, and Graham Nelson and Emily Short have played a significant part in that, along with many other people.
Most of the Latin epigraphs are translated within the help menus, if you so desire. I, your polymath LPer, definitely didn’t use that as a shortcut to translating them myself, and I certainly can read Latin fluently.
Most of what happens here in the Prologue is what screenwriters call “laying pipe”. We have, as obvious examples, the figure in black, Grad Kaldecki, this mysterious device and key, and the jigsaw pieces that will form the core of our story. There are some subtler examples I don’t want to call attention to, but what I do want to note is that the protagonist is ambivalent about the party, and indeed going on with our lives and moving forward in time is the losing condition. Then there’s the question of what it would mean for, at a party where everyone is wearing white to represent hope, to deliberately wear black.
Something that will come up again and again in Jigsaw’s puzzles is that the game expects you to have some idea of the roots of things. Knowing that old piano stools had a compartment inside, for example. Happy will be the player with some knowledge of French literature, aviation, medical history, or rock n’ roll.
3 Likes
Oh … Yeah, not sure why CLIMBING the pyramid didn’t occur to me. But I’m totally hooked now, and really interesting commentary too!
Curses is really good and a lot more open than Jigsaw, with much more to do even if you don’t figure out some of the puzzles. Jigsaw has much better writing (probably because of the tighter focus), but it’s also a lot less forgiving for newcomers. So if you like this, play that. 
Interested to see how this goes from outside time - and what exactly the person in black is up to?