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Transcribed from a pencil/paper journal entry I just finished writing:
Had an interesting, fairly complicated dream last night. The "setting" of the dream was that I was playing some kind of Silent Hill-like survival horror game. In this game, I was a patient(?) in a mental institution. I don't recall much at all about the overarching game, plot, or any other details. All I recall now is one specific puzzle I encountered in the game.
I (that is, the player character) was led to a table. My "half" of the table was a surface maybe two or three feet square. There was a small divider, an inch or two high, between my "half" and the other, larger "half." This other side was about the same length of two or three feet, but it had a sliding surface on top of it that went back and forth from left to right, which was divided up into six to twelve separate squares of two or three sq. ft.
So, the actual puzzle(s). The nurse who had led me to this table set up a bunch of playing cards on my "half," all face up but in seemingly random positions, some oriented "normally" with others turned 90° "sideways." It was my task to somehow reorient all these cards in a way that "made sense," thus "solving" the puzzle. And I could've done that, which would've gotten me some minor reward, some kind of item or weapon or key or something that I'd use in the overarching survival horror thing.
But the real puzzle was on the other "half" of the table. On each of the square segments on the sliding board, the nurse had set up a bunch of matchsticks, each a puzzle in its own right. The real challenge to solve all of these matchstick puzzles. However, the real difficulty of this is that I wasn't supposed to be messing with those.
The nurse would walk away from the table at intervals, which gave me a window to mess with the matchstick puzzles, but she would come back at random with little warning, and if I was caught, then I'd lose at both the matchstick and the card puzzles. Worse, whenever the nurse returned, she would randomly move matchsticks around on some of the segements, hindering progress on them. On top of that, whatever segement the sliding board had been "set to" when the nurse left, it had to be on that same one when she came back, or that counted as "getting caught" as well.
Several things here: 1) I got the impression that I needed to solve all of the puzzles, including the card puzzle, if I wanted the "true ending" of the overarching survival horror game, 2) I got the impression that I only had one shot at solving the puzzles and if I got caught, I would be locked out for good, barring the reloading of a save, 3) I got the impression that the most "recent" save point was pretty far back, and 4) I got the impression that if I ever encountered a puzzle like this, with these draconian restrictions, in a real world video game, it would almost assuredly be a game that I would completely abandon at that point, because to hell with that shit. I've never encountered anything quite that bad IRL, but some have come close.
So, yeah, that's the dream I had last night. It wasn't necessarily a bad dream, and I woke up actually feeling pretty decent for the first time in a long while, but that's certainly not something I'd want to encounter in a video game. Shit on that.
Had an interesting, fairly complicated dream last night. The "setting" of the dream was that I was playing some kind of Silent Hill-like survival horror game. In this game, I was a patient(?) in a mental institution. I don't recall much at all about the overarching game, plot, or any other details. All I recall now is one specific puzzle I encountered in the game.
I (that is, the player character) was led to a table. My "half" of the table was a surface maybe two or three feet square. There was a small divider, an inch or two high, between my "half" and the other, larger "half." This other side was about the same length of two or three feet, but it had a sliding surface on top of it that went back and forth from left to right, which was divided up into six to twelve separate squares of two or three sq. ft.
So, the actual puzzle(s). The nurse who had led me to this table set up a bunch of playing cards on my "half," all face up but in seemingly random positions, some oriented "normally" with others turned 90° "sideways." It was my task to somehow reorient all these cards in a way that "made sense," thus "solving" the puzzle. And I could've done that, which would've gotten me some minor reward, some kind of item or weapon or key or something that I'd use in the overarching survival horror thing.
But the real puzzle was on the other "half" of the table. On each of the square segments on the sliding board, the nurse had set up a bunch of matchsticks, each a puzzle in its own right. The real challenge to solve all of these matchstick puzzles. However, the real difficulty of this is that I wasn't supposed to be messing with those.
The nurse would walk away from the table at intervals, which gave me a window to mess with the matchstick puzzles, but she would come back at random with little warning, and if I was caught, then I'd lose at both the matchstick and the card puzzles. Worse, whenever the nurse returned, she would randomly move matchsticks around on some of the segements, hindering progress on them. On top of that, whatever segement the sliding board had been "set to" when the nurse left, it had to be on that same one when she came back, or that counted as "getting caught" as well.
Several things here: 1) I got the impression that I needed to solve all of the puzzles, including the card puzzle, if I wanted the "true ending" of the overarching survival horror game, 2) I got the impression that I only had one shot at solving the puzzles and if I got caught, I would be locked out for good, barring the reloading of a save, 3) I got the impression that the most "recent" save point was pretty far back, and 4) I got the impression that if I ever encountered a puzzle like this, with these draconian restrictions, in a real world video game, it would almost assuredly be a game that I would completely abandon at that point, because to hell with that shit. I've never encountered anything quite that bad IRL, but some have come close.
So, yeah, that's the dream I had last night. It wasn't necessarily a bad dream, and I woke up actually feeling pretty decent for the first time in a long while, but that's certainly not something I'd want to encounter in a video game. Shit on that.
