unforum

[TheFisherman]

Perplex City Academy

[Leeravitz]

I wouldn't rule it out...necessarily... But we also have a candidate closer to home than the obscure Vielle for performing such manipulations of the text, and that's Anna of the Cube Retrieval Team, whose interests lie in exactly the same area of specialism (witness her love of George Perec).

However, at the risk of sounding like the old cynic I frequently do, I'd say that virtually *none* of the websites we've encountered so far appear to have any discernible 'puzzle based' function. True, a good puzzle is never exactly in plain sight, but these sites have been pored over a fair bit, and little seems to have emerged. Quirky Acuity is at least useful, but doesn't seem to harbour obvious puzzles. That's even truer of Scarlett Kite, which appears to be there purely to report on the marketing success of the game. Whipsmart has always *seemed* highly significant without anything remotely useful actually being derived from it. Opendesign appears to to yield nothing. And so on. I don't personally find it hard to imagine that the Academy site looks to contain no puzzles, because it contains no puzzles. Again, the rather disappointing feeling I get is that these websites are 'stop - gaps', and are serving one of the following three purposes:

1. They are literally of little significance to the game proper, and have been prdouced to give players a 'taster' of what sort of thing is to come

2. They are intended to keep us interested in the Perplexian universe (to some extent) by extending our knowledge of said universe

3. The sites will become more significant in the future, when new info is added to them, or we gain more access to different parts of the site, but as with 75% (?) of all things Perplex City at the moment, the 'real game' hasn't started in earnest yet...

Even the Subway stuff, which is the first bit of decent puzzling we've gained in ages, seems like it *could* be a red herring - nothing more than a demonstration for a group of (potential) investors that this is what Mind Candy get up to in their spare time...

[ariadne_ac]

[yanka]

Re: Perplex City Academy