Category: Previews (Page 2 of 19)

The Light in the Mist Reveals Secrets One Tarot Card at a Time

September 27, 2021 / Michael Andersen

*The Light in the Mist* tarot puzzle tale, unboxed

Your friend Sam is missing. She had recently started taking walks through the misty woods beyond a cabin on the outskirts of the forest, to clear her head. But recently, she’s been different. Even more withdrawn and distant, yes…but also, something more. You discover her backpack and her deck of tarot cards at the edge of the woods, and approach the cabin for help. Locals call it the Witch House, but you suspect you’ll need the old woman’s help. Because some people claim the woods are haunted, and there’s a dark force lurking within the mists…

The Light in the Mist is a narrative puzzle experience created by PostCurious’ Rita Orlov and Jack Fallows that uses a tarot deck to guide readers through the story, one tarot card at a time. Every card of the Major Arcana presents players with a puzzle challenge, with clues scattered across the game’s Minor Arcana cards. Every solution unlocks snippets of Sam’s memories. These vignettes allow players to gradually piece together the secrets that led to Sam’s disappearance, and assemble the pieces needed to hopefully get her back.

The game’s Kickstarter campaign (which runs until Tuesday, October 19th) fully funded in two hours, so if you’re already won over, you can pre-order the game now for as little as $32, plus shipping. If you’re still not sure if you’re ready to plunge into the misty woods, read on to learn more about what hides beyond the mist.

Letters to Margaret Paints a Cruciverbalist Love Story

March 16, 2021 / Michael Andersen

Maggie A. Cross is a journalism student at Columbia University who runs a crossword blog along with her roommate Amanda, under pseudonyms. And while she doesn’t realize it, her professor pseudonymously runs a rival crossword blog along with his teaching assistant, Derry Down. As if that wasn’t complicated enough, when Maggie submits a crossword to the New York Times for consideration, she hears back…from the Times’ first crossword editor Margaret Farrar, who probably shouldn’t be providing editorial feedback on crosswords considering she’s been dead for almost 40 years.

This story of Maggie Cross and Derry Down’s tempestuous rivalry as well as the mystery of Margaret Farrar’s ghostly correspondence unfolds in Letters to Margaret, a graphic novel with a puzzling twist. As the novel progresses, readers are given the option to solve just shy of a dozen crosswords referenced in the book, including a series of puzzles that show Maggie’s guidance under the somewhat archaic tutelage of Margaret Farrar. Written by illustrated by Hayley Gold (who previously ran the crossword review webcomic Across and Down) and published by Lone Shark Games, Letters to Margaret‘s Kickstarter campaign will be running for the next two weeks (until March 29th). The campaign has already surpassed its funding goal, raising $31K from over 700 backers, at the time of this article. But the puzzling doesn’t end with crosswords.

Crossed Words: A Single Story, Two Perspectives
The book is split between Maggie and Derry’s perspectives. While Derry is frustrated by the racist, sexist, and exclusionary elements that often pop up in crossword puzzles, Maggie believes that calls to restrict the language in crosswords are going too far, stifling the creativity of constructors. This thematic split is echoed in the structure of the graphic novel, as the events unfold from Maggie’s perspective starting on one end of the book, and switch to Derry’s perspective on the other end, eventually meeting in the middle. Readers can choose to read the entire book from a single perspective before flipping over to see the other side, or can alternatively hop between chapters to see the book unfold in a rough approximation of chronological order. Both options are equally valid, although I’d recommend swapping perspectives every chapter, as flipping perspectives feels more powerful when the other half is still fresh in your mind.

At its heart, Letters to Margaret is a graphic novel about the power of words. Every character in the graphic novel shares a love for the English language, even the book’s duo of Statler and Waldorf style sentient arrow commentators. The book is packed to the brim with all the trivia, mixed metaphors, spoonerisms, and puns you could ever hope for, and much of the comedy in this romantic comedy comes from those moments of wordplay.

And while Maggie and Derry approach crosswords from different perspectives, the fact that the choice of words matters (whether they’re strung together into sentences or strategically placed in a 15×15 grid) is not up for debate. Where things get complicated and thorny is the question of where to draw the gridded lines. This is an issue the crossword community has been grappling with, and Letters to Margaret manages to illustrate that complexity with consideration and finesse. And while it may not provide answers to all the questions, it hopefully helps deepen the understanding of the questions themselves.

Gaslamp Fantasy Meets Puzzles for the ASPMC’s Cryptozoological Adventures

August 2, 2020 / Michael Andersen

During the twilight years of the 19th century, a collective of Massachusetts residents organized a series of tea parties dedicated to the appreciation and conservation of the region’s local wildlife. These parties eventually led to the foundation of the Audubon Society. Around the same time, a more magically inclined group of researchers and preservationists founded the American Society for the Protection of Magical Creatures, as a cryptozoological counterpart to the Audubon Society.

In October 2018, Green Door Labs and Stark Participation Design invited players to join in the creation of the ASPMC through the gaslight fantasy immersive production Save the Munbax at the Eustis Estate, an historic mansion where early members of the Audubon Society met. Over the course of an evening, visitors to the estate traveled back to the 1890s and worked together to help save the Northern Crested Dimmoth Munbax from extinction. This is a familiar playground for Green Door Labs, known for Club Drosselmeyer, an annual immersive performance that combines immersive theater, puzzles, and swing dance for a 1940s era period drama for a period-appropriate holiday party.

When Covid19 rendered many artists, writers, and freelancers in the entertainment sectors unemployed and under-employed, Green Door Labs resurrected the ASPMC and brought it into the 21st century to serve as a home for “original, story-based online puzzle hunts”. Under the game’s framework, the ASPMC sends players on family-friendly, modular missions that can be played independently, but also fit within a singular shared storyworld that is accessible to all. Initially funded through a Kickstarter campaign, the society’s first mission went live in late July, with two more missions slated to follow in the coming months.

PostCurious’ Emerald Flame Burns Bright in Alchemical Puzzle Experience

June 9, 2020 / Michael Andersen

The Koschei Society is an organization of scholars and historical enthusiasts. In the course of their research, the Koschei Society stumbled across a handful of artifacts that just might set an enterprising researcher on the path towards a legendary alchemist’s hiding spot, and the recipe for a transformative alchemical elixir. Are you wise enough, resourceful enough, and brave enough to be that enterprising researcher?

PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzle adventure The Emerald Flame begins with an invitation to assist the Koschei Society in poring over a series of letters and artifacts to unearth the ancient alchemist’s secret. Structured across three separate “chapters” of puzzle-driven narrative, players piece together the information necessary to advance the story, verifying answers through an online chat portal. The game’s Kickstarter campaign funded within 4 hours of its launch, and offers the full experience for as little as $69. The campaign will run through June 26th, and has already secured over a thousand backers eager to take on the Koschei Society’s challenge.

Burning Bright: A Seamless Blend of Art and Puzzle
Every chapter’s structure follows a similar framework: aspiring Koschei Society researchers are tasked with extracting information relevant to the investigation. Like many at-home puzzle experiences, these puzzles can be completed in any order, providing structure to the small group solving experience. However, The Emerald Flame‘s greatest strength is its ability to take things one step further, weaving the game’s art and its puzzles into an elegant tapestry.

The puzzles at the heart of The Emerald Flame aren’t always self-contained. So while some puzzles communicate everything that’s needed on a single sheet of paper, others are interspersed across the experience. Pulling on a puzzling thread on one line of inquiry might lead to a revelation about a detail expertly hidden within the art of another page, or teach you the rules of engagement for one of the game’s items. But the reverse is also true, with the game’s artistic stylings serving as signposts for players, hinting at what puzzle pieces are likely to fit together, if seen under the proper light. This interplay between art and puzzle leads to many of the most surprising moments of The Emerald Flame.

MIT Media Lab Experiments with Remote Controlled People for Halloween

October 28, 2018 / Michael Andersen

This Halloween, the MIT Media Lab is launching BeeMe, a dystopic tale about an evil artificial intelligence named “Zookd”. Starting at 11pm EST on October 31st, the story’s protagonist will be tasked with stopping Zookd in real time. There’s just one twist: in order to face off against Zookd, the protagonist will relinquish all free will, leaving their every action over the course of the story up for popular vote.

According to BeeMe’s project page, the game is designed to “push crowdsourcing and collective intelligence to the extreme to see where it breaks down”. The system itself is relatively straightforward: viewers can log on to the website and submit recommended actions for the protagonist to do, as well as voting alternate proposals up or down. After a certain amount of time has passed, the remote controlled human is charged with carrying out the most popular choice.Â In a lighthearted example, BeeMe’s Twitter account shared an example of BeeMe volunteer Evan staring intently at a stuffed giraffe as a direct result of the dubious wisdom of the crowd during a focus group leading up to the official release.

Here are some moments from our Friday night session: Stare intensely at the giraffe. pic.twitter.com/XM7maCeXEx

— BeeMe (@beeme_mit) August 6, 2018

Cognizant that not all requests would involve staring at stuffed animals, project lead Niccolo Pescetelli explained to Business Insider that “anything that violates the law or puts the actor, their privacy, or their image in danger is strictly forbidden…anything else is allowed.” The experience’s trailer doubles down on this ominous spin on things, with the “Wisdom Program Communications” program seeking verbal assent from the “Agent”Â before handing over bodily autonomy to the collective BEEs (Behavioural Enhancement Entitites).

Handing over individual control to collective forces has been a subject of fascination for some time, withÂ Twitch Plays PokÃ©mon seeing if the comments section of a Twitch channel could be capable of beatingÂ PokÃ©mon Red one move at a time. While the game’s initial “Anarchy” mode treated all commands sequentially, the game’s eventual introduction of “Democracy” mode subjected all decisions to a public vote.Â BeeMe‘s structure bears a close resemblance toÂ Twitch Plays PokÃ©mon‘s Democracy mode. While the Twitch incarnation of this idea took collective commands and input them into a Nintendo controller,Â BeeMe will be feeding those commands into a trained actor.

This past year’s MIT Mystery Hunt also explored different variations of this idea with their Inside Out-themed puzzle hunt. ForÂ Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt, puzzle hunters collectively played a single player game in Anarchy mode. Completing that puzzle unlocked Under Control, where one player on each team was sent as tribute to give up their free will and follow instructions sent via YouTube Live comments to navigate an augmented reality world that was only visible to people watching the stream. The Hunt’s grand finaleÂ required players to follow a series of intentionally convoluted instructions to remotely control “Terry” as she navigates the halls of MIT while livestreaming her progress via camera rig.

BeeMe takes things a step further, challenging viewers with an open-ended playground to navigate, with almost no limits in place to curb the crowd’s impulses, for better or for worse. The question here isn’t merely one of seeing whether collective intelligence can identify the optimal courses of action, but whether they can impose enough structure toÂ act upon those courses while resisting the temptation to stare at stuffed giraffes, or worse. As the game’s promotional materials repeatedly asks, “How does it feel to be the Internet?”

Pescetelli estimates that the Halloween hijinks should take around two hours to play out, although the full length is ultimately up to the choices made by the project’s viewers. But the real question remains:Â will viewers be able to Twitch Plays PokÃ©mon their way into saving the world from an evil AI, or will their capricious choices cast viewers as the real villain of the story?

Go to BeeMe.online to join in the experiment at 11pm on October 31st, and follow @Beeme_MIT on Twitter. But try to behave – there’s a lot at stake.

#NOFILTER Imagines an Even More Dismal Social Media Hellscape for Us

September 28, 2018 / Michael Andersen

Social media can be an absolute trashfire. But don’t worry, starting on October 2nd, it’s about to get a whole lot worse – that’s when pseudonym productions is launching out #NOFILTER, a “horrifyingly satirical, totally narcissistic thriller starring YOU.” For as little as $14, players can sign up to participate in a six-week long experience that invites players to enter an alternate world where the United States government created Connectionsâ„¢ as a mandatory social media platform designed to solve all our problems.

Sarah Elgar, pseudonym productions’ president and creative director, explains that the game is designed “to satirize the sad state of social networks…in the most absurdly over the top ways possible”, and the skewering of social media starts before the game even begins, with the registration process.Â For $14, players can sign up for the “Follower” level, which provides access to the main game experience that takes place on the Connectionsâ„¢ platform, with the ability to score coveted invitations to the games’ weekly liveÂ “physical happenings”, centered around at least four major cities in California, Florida, and New York. Paying a premium for “Verified” or “influencer” status opens up more personalized character interactions, as well as in-game recognition for their elevated status as a reminder that some people are just better than others.

Once players are registered, they become drafted onto the Connectionsâ„¢ platform, where they are encouraged to perform compulsory life-affirming tasks like completing daily wellness routines and selfie duties. In parallel, players are encouraged to explore the stories of prominent users like the platform’s creator Nolan Stauf, yoga instructor Taylor Hill, and internet provocateur Vokorev with a story that might just verge into the supernatural.

While the game hasn’t launched yet, the #NOFILTER website provides a number of hints at the experience to come, sharing a sample chat log with Nikki as she goes about her daily selfie and NeoGa (Neo Yoga) quota in for the day that devolves into something else entirely. The FAQ is also peppered with more than a few bon mots, and the responses alone provide the best sales pitch for the experience available. Reminding prospective players that status is everything, the FAQ notes that “those who want to be all-in for 6 weeks and absolutely be part of everything they can and have us basically worship them should select the Influencer level, naturally. because Influencers are the most important people in the world. obviously.” The how to play section comes with its own ominous warning, noting that “#NOFILTER‘s story is a satire of social media, so it will help to be familiar with various social networks like facebook, instagram, and twitter – and the horrible trolling, doxxing, bullying, and narcissistic behavior that goes on there. but if that’s not your jam, you’ll still enjoy this experience. in fact, more power to you.” But as much as the game will explore peoples’ horrible behaviors online, it has a clearly stated zero-tolerance policy towards players directing that behavior towards each other – players caught harrassing, bullying, or violating the privacy of other players will receive instant bans, with no refund.

Validate my self worth by sharing this article. Then go back and like, share, retweet, hashtag, pin, upvote, toot, snap, and Insta-fave it whenever you see it online to fill the void in my life. Or better yet, sign up forÂ #NOFILTERÂ to find out how much worse things can get.Â But remember, the game starts in earnest on October 2nd, so act quick or you’ll risk a serious case of #FOMO.