Gray Matter 3: Oopsies

Oh dear.


The Gray Matter manual says don't worry, you can't screw up your game by missing something.


Well, yeah, you can.


The thing I missed was right at the beginning of Day Four. I didn't pick up the newspaper in the kitchen. The newspaper is on the kitchen counter. If you take Sam to the kitchen, she'll talk to the cook and tell her she's going straight to Oxford and doesn't want breakfast.


There is a newspaper sitting on the counter. It is light gray. So is the counter. It's hard to see.

And the newspaper didn't even have a cat on it

I grant you, I did look at the newspaper at the beginning of Day Two. So I should have known to look for it again, right? Yes, but it's been several real days since I did that. When Sam said she was going straight to Oxford, that's where I went.


In other words, I did a stupid thing.


And yes, if you don't look at that newspaper, you can't finish Day Four, even if you go back and find it later. Period. End of discussion. Here's why:


The newspaper is a trigger for Sam to learn a new name--someone she's supposed to interview as part of her investigation. Without the newspaper you can do the Daedalus riddle, and you can do the section in the Neurology Dept. But without the newspaper, you won't trigger a discussion with Mephistopheles in the magic shop that sets up most of Sam's investigation. It starts the section "There's a plant in the house." When you leave the shop, one of the students films you in the street.


I went to the magic shop. I talked with Mephistopheles. But he didn't say anything about that thread. I bought magic stuff. I found the new riddle. I left the shop. The student filmed me.


When I realized the massive extent of my stuckness and decided I had to revisit all the hot spots last night, I didn't find the newspaper because it didn't occur to me to go back to Dread House. My bad, absolutely. But it turned out that my only 99% retrace wasn't the problem.


At that point I went to two WTs, which demonstrated the extent of my problem. I went back to the kitchen and read the paper.  That did trigger the interview, but nothing else.


I'd already been to the magic shop, you see. Going back didn't trigger any further discussion with Mephistopheles, so I still didn't get the trigger for the rest of the "plant in the house" thread.


I spent far too much time slogging (very slowly) up and down the corridors of the St. Edmunds dorm. You're supposed to talk to the proctors on floors two and three, but Sam always said "I don't need to talk to him now." The newspaper trigger leads to the Mephistopheles trigger. Without that, you don't have a "plant in the house" thread, and you cannot do more than half the chapter, with no remedy possible.

Moral: save early, save often (fortunately, I did).

Anyway, I started the entire chapter over, read the dratted newspaper, and everything's working fine now. It was actually rather amazing to see how much is left out without that trigger. It's also interesting to see that the game specifically guides you through the chapter, pretty much telling you where to go next.

Very interesting chapter. If you get the trigger. Again, I will check this out tonight to be absolutely sure that it's a design problem. I think lots of folks are going to miss that newspaper. Just sayin'.

I'm going to check this out again, because I still have that saved game and I don't want to accuse Jane Jensen, of all people, of faulty game design. If I'm right, then this indeed is a game design problem. Because everything hinges on finding that newspaper, the game shouldn't have let me out of the house until I found it. It doesn't have to prompt the trigger directly, by, say, having Sam say "Gee, I outta read the newpaper." She could just say, "I can't leave yet." Just limit the playing area until the player has found that crucial trigger.


People are going to be stupid sometimes. When we are stupid, we ought to pay by having major stucknesses. However, being occasionally stupid should not ruin the rest of the game. Stop stupid players like me not from stuckness, but from game-ending blunders. (I'm betting that none of the game's beta testers were as stupid as I was, so they didn't find the problem.)


Update: I checked back and still couldn't get the game to advance. However, I am by this time heartily sick of this chapter. I'll check back again with a couple of WTs later on to be absolutely sure I'm accusing the game rightly. I want to be wrong, but I'll wait till I've finished before trying it all again (I'm having too much fun playing again).


Up-Update: A second check following both WTs again resulted in no progress. Here's what happened: I had the crucial conversation with Mephistopheles before I found the newspaper, so I didn't trip the branch in that conversation tree that triggers the "Plants" thread. And yes, it is unfixable. Mephistopheles won't talk to me again, so I really could not complete the "Plants" thread. Only solution: start the chapter over.


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