Puzzllotto #2
“The order of the puzzles in Puzzllotto has more to do with playability than solvability.”
This showed up on their Twitter feed yesterday. It has bothered me that at various points during the puzzles there seem to be multiple potential paths. Usually a bad move will pop up a “Fosa” and reset the level back to the beginning, but occasionally there are multiple potentially valid moves. These always seem to involve a lemur, and often a lemur that can be “toggled”.
I had some time to kill last night, and so I revisited the first level. Lo and behold — I found another solution. It shares some intriguing similarities with the first solution I found, in that some of the moves are the same, and “chunks” of them are different (but often seem like reversed/incremented versions). The really weird thing about it is that it’s possible to end with a lemur showing and 8 captured butterflies (!) This is a bit confusing. In this case, the Lemur is placed on eye location #4. As it turns out, at that point you can tap eyes #1 to pop up the “win” dialog. *Or*, you can deactivate the Lemur by tapping it, then tap eyes #1 to pop up a Lemur in a different spot, then tap the empty #4 spot to win!
Is there a ‘best’ solution to each level? Are the butterflies more of a hindrance than a help? Maybe it involves the Lemurs? (This last solution I mentioned has three lemurs on the screen at one point…)
Puzzllotto
Puzzllotto, the world’s most annoying iPhone game? A combination of the words “Puzzle”, and “Lotto”, it appears to be some sort of fund-raising experiment, with a $30K potential cash prize. I imagine part of the purpose of the prize is to discourage people from talking about partial solutions on blogs such as this one. But, who cares!
Suckered in by the appeal of both a puzzle and a relatively large sum of money, I bought it. The game basically consists of 4 levels, with 8 sets of eyes on each level. When you click on them, you either get a butterfly (good), a Lemur (sort of good), or a Fosa (an animal which scares everyone else away, and you start the level over). Solving a level can be accomplished by trial and error in under an hour, if you keep notes.
At the end of each level, you get a bunch of text in Malagasy, the language evidently spoken in Madagascar. The online translators for Malagasy aren’t very good, and the language has weird syntactic constructions (including a Verb / Object / Subject word order), but the message seems to roughly be something along the lines of “Congratulations! You have an exceptionally clever mind! This will get more difficult but if with effort you can dig through it!”. Then it presents you with three options, “Ovay”, “Manomboha”, and “Mijanona” which seem to move you back and forward through the levels.
I beat all four levels, and from a quick YouTube search, a number of people have. (Hint: 2 and 4 are vertical reflections of 1 and 3). But I can’t pick up any pattern in the move solutions, besides a few general observations such as: Lemurs can often be toggled, but sometimes turn into butterflies. Certain solutions seem to have equally valid branch paths (reflections?). The solutions show hints of recursion. Click one wrong button and the stupid thing restarts at the beginning. Et cetera.
Once you beat level 4, there’s a way to get to another screen which is even more confusing — I won’t describe that here, but it points to some sort of deeper pattern-based puzzle.
Given that there is no further interaction, this all leads me to believe that it’s a cryptogram of sorts designed to lead you to some “out of game” solution (hidden website, etc). Or, the level traversal buttons could indicate that the levels need to be solved in a particular order — why else would you want to go back to the beginning, or replay the same level again?