For those of you who have played Schizm...

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Quoting me:
Schizm:
1) the infamous bridges (c'mon, why cant we save in between?)
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Think, think! The save would make this puzzle no-brainer. Actually most players tried to pass it without thinking about the strategy. There is a strategy which makes winning almost sure. I am lousy adventure gamer but knowing that strategy I didn't have any problems with passing this puzzle.

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Quoting me again:
2) Monk/tile/sounds ...especially the sounds

3) 2nd coordinates set, Im not great adding nums in degrees, especially when the place we got our nums from in the first place was nonsensically skipping one (Amazing that this fact didnt slow me up sooner!)
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Frankly speaking, what's the point of puzzle where you have to match/add/combine easily recognizable symbols or easy to understand sounds. Where's the challenge? Also, some symbols/sounds easy to understand for some (e.g. Americans) are very hard for others (other nations).
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Quote:
The monk chants a string of nonsense words. It is very hard to know where one nonsense word ends and the next one begins. Like listening to a foreign language that you don't speak, it's one long stream of sounds.
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That words are nonsense for you, not for Argilans... Anyway, those words were just sounds, their meaning isn't important for the puzzle. And as I said, something meaningful for you isn't meaningful for large portion of gamers.

The puzzle required matching some sounds with shapes. In order to make it simpler for those who don't have musical ear, we chose nonsense words instead of sounds with varied pitch (valve puzzle in Reah comes to mind, that one was difficult) or melodies.

The words monks shouts are difficult to understand because:

1. He is a ghost and ghosts usually speak differently.
2. He appears at large distance from you and as in real life the distance makes sounds harder to hear.
3. What's worse, he shouts those words in large space with very high reverberation, which again makes them even more difficult to hear.

There are reasons for that situation as you can see, besides the necessity of making the puzzle harder.

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Quote: (Note a poster suggested they make some puzles fuzzier instead of harder)

I'm not sure if the word "scrambled" is used in a technical sense, but I was talking specifically about *fuzzy*, meaning hard to see the details. The visual equivalent of hard to hear the details. You didn't answer that question.
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Yes, "fuzzy" could be used as well. For example to hide details of something but allowing to see only a shape which consequently can be used to figure out the hidden details.
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He may have missed the point, Bijtje, but for once I am in total agreement with you. The first time you make the monk appear, he blurts out his chant before you can even grab your pencil, assuming you had one at the ready. Then you have to wander back and forth across that area hoping to trigger his reappearance. Lets say you finally get him to reappear and have pencil and notepaper ready... you start to write down what he says, but it is an unintelligible mishmash of sounds.

There is simply NO WAY to transcribe the priest's chant without several repeated listenings. At least there wasn't for me. It took hearing it about 4-5 times. And like me or hate me, I think even my enemies will agree that I'm no moron. Simply put, Maciek is flat-out wrong when he contends that, "there is no need to go hear the monk more than twice."

On the other hand, I will agree with him that the puzzle isn't "unfair." The random appearance of the priest when you hit the correct spot, the distortion of his voice, the distance between the priest and the "practice" prayer grinder (which FORCES you to write down the chant phonetically, as it takes several minutes to get from where you hear the chant to where you can practice repeating it) and the five "red herring" sets of grinders within the temple itself all contribute to make an already tough sound puzzle maddening. But it is fair.

It just wasn't fun.

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Make Schizm fuzzier? They did that too. It was called the cd version

Helllooo Maciek!

Good to hear from you...even though I hardly agree with a word you've said *chuckles*

Now, I listed Schizm as a favourite game for good reason. It certainly gave me that happy "aha" feeling when I *did* solve a puzzle/section. The plot was cool, The locations were amazing. I loved Hannah & Sam (Hi Sam!) The ending & a few of the puzzles..could have used a little more work.

NO, I dont think it would have made the bridge "too easy" if I could have saved in between rounds. It wasnt easy the first time! It was a fun challenge until I found I had to win twice in a row to go on. (I'd love the circuit puzzle as a minigame, though)

Tough but fair? uumm making me learn an alien system is fair, skippings nums in a standard measuring device is pushing it IMO

If I need to learn something new, it helps if there is a way to learn it without more twists..like the neat mural y'all did of the survey machine at the temple or Myst's holographic control in Mechanical Age.

and the Priest thing was cool to experience, but sadly you felt this incredible need to make a reasonably hard puzzle even harder by adding the reverberation (among other things). I hate to tell you this but We (my Mom and I) solved it intuitively without entirely understanding what was going on. My notes have five versions of the phonetics as we struggled with it. THEN we got to the prayer grinder wheel/color thing. All in all it took days to get past there. That whole experience wasnt nearly as entertaining as the parts that made it up ..the tiles, the speech, prayer grinders etc

By contrast the airship sound puzzle was lovely. You could hear each piece clearly.

The fish ship coordinates puzzle was fun, the first city coordinate challenge was fun. Working out the second set wasnt at all.

Do you know how often I add coordinates in real life? Care to guess? How about a happy page explaining how to do this in the emergency technical journal Hannah wasn't carrying. 'Course I will still have to translate to Argilan but at least I have the principle...
& Hey, I learned something!

HHmmm its a balloon collector: Nice of the Professor to mumble that phrase about adding values before she vanished... Told me this was meant to be worked out as a math problem IF I could just work out how to set that up...(as opposed to overloading pressure on a pipe or something else) Do you see what I mean now? Clues dont have to be huge spoilers.

Give me a good puzzle, yes! I love that! but please give me a way to solve it too.

Overall, I think you guys did a great job & so we are looking forward to Schizm2. I'll give you this, there is a definite sense of having accomplished something in completing your game(s)

Frankly, every puzzle seems easy when you know the answers.

And makes sense when you know the reasons.

The trick is conveying the necessary background to the player without spoiling the game. This is the bit that needs tweaking IMHO

Sincerely,

Salar
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