Spoilers LDS: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North & Chris Fenoglio Review Thread
- Thread starter David cgc
- Start date
I'm glad this thread exists. Thanks for being polite about spoiling.
Think Invisiclues. And you don't really need any spoilers, nor do you need to use the trick I found, so long as you visit every single dead-end, note down their page numbers, and then compare them with each other.
I'm still waiting for the first work of LD prose fiction.
I mentioned "Invisiclues" a couple of times.
Infocom didn't invent interactive fiction; there was already a mainframe game called "Adventure" or "Collossal Cave." But it did, so far as I'm aware, invent the term, and also developed a virtualization technology that made it very easy to port: when Dave Lebling and Mark Blank first developed the original mainframe Zork (aka Dungeon), they built a generalized parser, and developed a file format allowing them to put the actual game into a data file, that would then be hardware-independent: you could then use the same parser (which would be much easier to port than the entire game) for a variety of games, and so long as you had a parser for the system you wanted to run the game on, the most you'd have to change about the game file itself would be (maybe) the character encoding. Infocom started when Lebling and Blank found they had to split Zork into three separate games in order to get it to fit on a floppy disk.
And Invisiclues began when players began demanding hints: for every problem area of a game, a series of increasingly explicit hints would be printed in invisible ink, with a developer pen supplied with the shrink-wrapped book. When they began to offer in-program hints, they kept the concept of revealing increasingly explicit hints. We can do this here, with nested spoiler tags!
Invisiclues for Warp Your Own Way
I mentioned "Invisiclues" a couple of times.
Infocom didn't invent interactive fiction; there was already a mainframe game called "Adventure" or "Collossal Cave." But it did, so far as I'm aware, invent the term, and also developed a virtualization technology that made it very easy to port: when Dave Lebling and Mark Blank first developed the original mainframe Zork (aka Dungeon), they built a generalized parser, and developed a file format allowing them to put the actual game into a data file, that would then be hardware-independent: you could then use the same parser (which would be much easier to port than the entire game) for a variety of games, and so long as you had a parser for the system you wanted to run the game on, the most you'd have to change about the game file itself would be (maybe) the character encoding. Infocom started when Lebling and Blank found they had to split Zork into three separate games in order to get it to fit on a floppy disk.
And Invisiclues began when players began demanding hints: for every problem area of a game, a series of increasingly explicit hints would be printed in invisible ink, with a developer pen supplied with the shrink-wrapped book. When they began to offer in-program hints, they kept the concept of revealing increasingly explicit hints. We can do this here, with nested spoiler tags!
Invisiclues for Warp Your Own Way
Read the caption.
There is no way to get to this 2-page spread except by ignoring the links at the bottom of the previous page.
It's just a humorous way of telling you to pay attention to the links!
See the previous hint.
Quite true. Every path that follows explicit links will end up with Mariner getting killed. And even if you get to all the death scenes you can reach, you've only been through about half the pages.
But look at her death scenes.
Notice that they all seem to involve the prefix code for the Cerritos?
Notice that some of them involve a strange, malicious woman with a Xindi Insectoid companion?
Pay attention to what they say.
Pay attention to what the Xindi Insectoid says about limited choices.
The unseen voice that's talking to Mariner is you.
The metafictional conversations are telling you that you've successfully found your way onto the first hidden track.
To get here, you either had to find the Xindi Insectoid's in-game hint, or you've just gone to the first un-visited page after the VISORed penguins.
Notice that you now end up with a fourth choice, where previously only had three.
Maybe, but there are death scenes you haven't visited before.
Two of them, in fact.
They look identical, but they aren't.
Each one is missing a step, but they're not missing the same step.
Once you combine the two death scenes, you have your instructions for getting to the second hidden track.
Once you're on the second hidden track, the only way Mariner dies is if you follow a link that leads back to the open track or the first hidden track.
Neither Migleemo nor Kayshon say or do anything significant in this story, and if you think they do, you're hallucinating.
Read through the second hidden track again, only following different links. As long as you stay on the second hidden track, you eventually wind up saving the Cerritos; you just get there in slightly different ways.
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I did it! I got to the end last night! Thank you @David cgc and @hbquikcomjamesl for the hints and encouragement (I managed to refrain from clicking your spoilers until just now). I'd already got to the engineering path end with the Xindi before your hints, and although what he said stuck in my mind,
Then, when I reached the bit near the end where Mariner started reeling off a formula before she died, I knew I'd have to make a note of it even though it seemed nonsensical.
- and got to the path that led to the endgame!
I bought a copy of WYOW for my niece for Christmas, partly so we could help each other through it, but last time I spoke with her, she hadn't managed to get past the first part either (as I hadn't until last night). So, I'll give her the "take note of what the Xindi is saying" hint and hopefully she'll get to the end, too.
This is a fantastic book with a very Lower Decks story - I loved it! Even the multiple dead ends that I couldn't get through (Mariner vs Spock Clock softened my frustration enormously).
I hadn't thought to add the page numbers together to get to the Earl Grey Tea option
Once at the end of the similar path, I did the maths using the two formulas - but with a calculator this time!
I bought a copy of WYOW for my niece for Christmas, partly so we could help each other through it, but last time I spoke with her, she hadn't managed to get past the first part either (as I hadn't until last night). So, I'll give her the "take note of what the Xindi is saying" hint and hopefully she'll get to the end, too.
This is a fantastic book with a very Lower Decks story - I loved it! Even the multiple dead ends that I couldn't get through (Mariner vs Spock Clock softened my frustration enormously).
Oh I wasn't going to discuss it here, I just was just seeing if there was enough interest to start one here since it was the only Lower Decks thread I saw. I'll probably just go over to the general comics thread for now.
I forgot one thing in my Invisiclues, that you could always find in genuine Infocom Invisiclues: a false lead that has nothing to do with the story. Rectified.
I’ve been reading this (checked out from the public library). I’ve read as many branching options as I could find and knew I still have more that I couldn’t have read yet (including the actual ending). So, I started paging through from beginning to end to come across the first pages I’d not read yet. I, of course, saw the double page spread with the VISORed penguins. But the next page I came to that I hadn’t been directed to before is page 82 (with Mariner in the arboretum saying “Wait. Something’s different.” I have leafed through the entire book twice looking for any pages with “go to page 82” as an option and can’t find any. Is this a publishing mistake or am I just blind?
— David Young
— David Young
Okay, I’d avoided looking at the blurred out parts of his post before because I didn’t want plot spoilers. But now I’ve looked at it. Geez, there’s hidden (or hinted at) MATH involved??? I’m not crazy about that.
I’ve really been enjoying the book so far, but this might just bump it down from five stars to four stars for me.
In my opinion, these types of books must have clearly established rules and paths to follow. Having key sequences not pointed to by any of the “go to” directions and instead expecting the reader to figure out that they are *supposed to* eventually do what I did and just find the first page that none of the paths take them to (or doing only obliquely hinted at math on the side to come up with the necessary page numbers) violates those rules.
— David Young
Welcome to an old trick that CYOA authors would employ. Having passages that are wholly disconnected that you will ONLY find by end-to end'ing the thing. They range from wacky, to 'everyone dies,' to 'you're not supposed to be here, how'd you get here?! You cheated!'
And see my "Invisclues" post. It works exactly like classic Infocom Invisiclues, with the deeply nested spoiler tags giving escalating hints, starting with a subtle nudge and ending with a giveaway. And note that while mapping the book, and looking for pages not visited will work, there are in-story ways to calculate links that aren't given explicitly that will get you where you need to go.
I also endorse your clues as better than my walkthrough.
To be honest, I appreciated that there was some small bit of making a game out of it, so that it wasn’t just a basic decision tree throughout. And not only that, but worked the whole style of the book into the context of the narrative. To each their own, though. The clues weren’t really that obfuscated. IIRC, the only page in the book that couldn’t be reached by following either the tree or the clues was the one with the penguins.
I still thought it was very well done and enjoyed it thoroughly. But, again, my experience with these types of books is that every possible “path” must be reachable by the reader’s given choices. If the reader is also supposed to be looking for “clues” then it should be stated somewhere at the beginning of the book. The penguins page is there specifically as a gag saying to the readers, “Hey, you’ve got to follow the directions at the bottom of the page!” But then that turns out not to be the case in order to get to the actual conclusion of the story. (And, I will admit, that any puzzle requiring me to *figure out* from clues I need to do *math* is one I’m not going to do well at.)
— David Young
We obviously have different views on this, but one of the things I loved about this book was that you had to work out what was going on.
There were hints that said you needed to do something and looking for those clues actually increased my own enjoyment of the book.
And working out a brute-force solution, then learning of the intended solution in hindsight, then using nested spoiler tags to create a set of Invisiclues based on the old Infocom "subtle nudge progressing to idiot giveaway" pattern all added to my own enjoyment.
Warp Your Own Way is up for a Hugo! Best Graphic Story or Comic.