Funny, but a bit too easy, I think. At least, I got a warning when I made an error (my only one), which makes light work of progress. The fact that I had only one error is an indication of the ease (I'm not a native speaker of English), and complex puzzling usually involves backtracking or multiple tries to achieve a single step.
I enjoy the concept, and think you could be onto something - but it seemed a bit too easy to be satisfying. I think the path to solving the puzzle is a bit too straightforward. That is, removing a letter one by one WILL get you to the solution, and there’s not enough of a cognitive work-out to figure out the next one to remove.
I don’t have a solution mind you, but having made Stackdown and been on a similar journey, I needed the feedback to get it where it is now.
What is the hidden phrase? I suppose ”Plants plans plan pan” can be understood as a grammatically correct phrase, but a really quite odd one. I don’t think that’s what’s intended to be a hidden phrase?
I was upset I couldn’t keep popping off letters even though I had discovered the “hidden phrase”. Give me the bubble wrap umami and let me continue whittling away until there aren’t any subwords left.
Fun, but like others have said, felt somewhat easy. Or really, it feels like the gameplay is too short. Maybe you can shrink down a word, then replace it with a longer synonym or something, and repeat? That way you get a couple rounds of gameplay per puzzle.
Especially for first time players this is absolutely worst experience. Combined with "game knows better", where even valid choice is incorrect, makes this game not fun.
Would it be possible to have 3-4 words and you have to make sure that each word you produce results in a valid phrase? So not only the final phrase makes sense, but you have to navigate through a path of valid phrases.
This way you might remove a letter from different words and have to think ahead to decide if the result would remain coherent in order to avoid an error.
The computational complexity of identifying phrases that can be reduced like this while having a coherent path might increase rapidly.
My only confusion was when I’d correctly reduced one word to the required for the phrase, but didn’t get any feedback that it was correct. I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t accept my “valid” shorter word
Lots of people seem to complain that it's too easy but as a non native speaker it was too hard for me and it felt super frustrating cause you can't retry or see the solution
I love the idea but when I tried to reduce "SCARFS" to "CAR" (the right answer) it rejected my choice of S, but let me select the other letters. Looks like a bug. Clean it up and I would love to play more!
Is it broken today? Seems like getting to the "solution" isn't working for anyone... even if you get 3 errors it just doesn't tell you the correct answer.
17 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadI don’t have a solution mind you, but having made Stackdown and been on a similar journey, I needed the feedback to get it where it is now.
Keep going!
Oh, also I really like the tidy design.
I appreciate all your feedback and I am working to improve the experience.
Thanks
This way you might remove a letter from different words and have to think ahead to decide if the result would remain coherent in order to avoid an error.
The computational complexity of identifying phrases that can be reduced like this while having a coherent path might increase rapidly.