Trapped Girl X

Interesting puzzles, fun, I'm stuck + Some unclear puzzle design

Background: I played Trapped Girls but basically gave up on that one and just watched other people solve it. I decided to give this one a good try for real with no walkthrough. I feel accomplished when I figure puzzles out in the game. However, some of them I only find out from randomly trying everything, which takes a lot of time, and not actual logic. Right now I'm stuck, and I hope I'll eventually discover how to finish the game, but I feel worried that the solution is going to end up being something illogical that I would have never figured out. I get that this is supposed to be a challenge, but I don't fully trust that the puzzle solutions will be reasonable and solvable and it discourages me from continuing my efforts. There's a post in the game dev's blog that talks about guidelines for their puzzle design (e.g. unused items are allowed, irreversible situations are allowed, clues that require editing pictures aren't), and if the game had some clear guidelines like that, I would feel more assured. Review Update: After several months having deleted this app because I couldn't figure out the puzzle I was on, I decided to look at a walkthrough. The solution to where I was stuck was very hard to figure out and many other people were stuck at the same part. Basically, you need to find a code, but there is no obvious place to find it. There are several intentional red herrings that look important and look like they could be the code, but aren't. The actual code is hidden in a place that most players would never even consider, because there is no indication that it is important. So, after checking the solution to this puzzle, I feel like I never would have figured it out, not only because it was hard, but because I didn't even know I was entering the wrong code. This is what happened when I was playing the game. I was tricked by one of the red herring clues, entered the wrong code, and was unable to progress. However, I thought that the reason I was unable to progress was because I hadn't saved all of the characters before entering the code. I spent my time trying to find ways to save more characters, which was actually impossible at that stage, rather than realizing I had the wrong code and looking for the right code. Therefore, the main criticism I have for this puzzle design is that the game doesn't give specific feedback that tells the player what they got wrong. When you enter a code wrong, the game doesn't say "wrong code", but basically just "bad ending". That made me get the complete wrong idea of what I had to go "solve" to progress and essentially made me spend my energy on later-stage puzzles, when I hadn't even cleared one of the first puzzles yet. A simple "incorrect" beep indicator would have really improved the experience. Another different but related issue is that (I THINK) there is no difference in feedback whether you use a "red herring" code or just enter something random, which also adds to the lack of clarity on what you did wrong. (I haven't played in a while, so this might be inaccurate.) I decided to remove one star from my rating. First, there's a problem that I didn't realize before I checked a walkthrough - a lack of puzzle feedback makes the game artificially difficult, as you can make an error somewhere and have no idea that you did. Even when the game tells you you've gotten an early bad ending, it doesn't indicate why clearly enough. It's hard to say if the solution is too illogical and unreasonable when I wasn't even able to clearly identify that I needed to solve this puzzle and put a full effort into solving it. Maybe I would have figured it out after spending 8 hours looking for clues, or maybe I never would have and that's a game problem too. However, the fact that I wasn't directed to solve the first puzzle first and instead went wayward to try hard at puzzles that couldn't even be solved yet, is the bigger issue than if it could be solved in a logical way. I have experienced a similar issue with a different puzzle game, where I kept losing, but got the wrong idea of why because it wasn't clearly communicated. Just like with this game, I ended up spending lots of energy trying solutions the developer never intended me to think about, and completely missing the solution they did want me to notice. I see these kinds of miscommunications as a fundamental game design problem.

Amazing

Can’t wait for the next one!