Sanity Falls - Last Time Around

** Thar be spoilers ahead - Best beware! **

As the note says, spoilers. Mild ones, in some regard - and, in any event, I'm only guessing as to the meaning of it all. I will wait to post this for some time, to minimize the number of people who might be reading this still working on the hunt.

--------------

After a time, I collected all fifty parts of the ransom - $1,000,000 - and waited for instructions. However, as I waited, I I saw the timer tick to zero. I had failed!

I found myself on the bridge leading into Sanity Falls, just where I started, except that  the sky was the color of an apocalypse and the bridge itself in ruins, ending abruptly and falling to an abyss below.



Here was an apparition, a ghostly Alex perched on the edge of the bridge, as if ready to jump. But Alex is me, right? How could I be both here and there?



I tried to grab him, only to find him/me/us falling…a long way down...



…only to find myself unharmed in a subterranean room - a warehouse? - that appeared to be hastily outfitted for medical work. Beyond the room was a locked door. (And many thanks to the two people who helped me out at this point. I puzzled over the code to unlock the door for quite some time before asking for help. In the end, the trick turned out to be quite simple.) Beyond the door, a corridor. Beyond the corridor, another locked door, and finally...



…the end.

I enjoyed the game very much. I'm not a big fan of hunts, so my enjoyment came from the mystery itself, following the storyline to a satisfactory conclusion. (I'll say I suspected a good portion of it, but being right doesn't take away from the enjoyment.) The entire experience was well-done. Kudos to the Madpea team!

As I think about the resolution, I do wonder, though: was Livea ever real?

Sanity Falls Again

After Miss Kiana Writer's pep talk (in the comments of my previous entry on the hunt) I took up the hunt again. I had found 47 of the clues from town, but redoubled my efforts to find the last three.
That accomplished, I turned to finding the ransom money in earnest. As usual with hunts and clues, some were easy, some difficult, and some downright nasty. (And, no doubt, which bucket the clues fit into is highly idiosyncratic. What I found nearly impossible others might find child's play, and vice-versa.)



At two points along the way, I uncovered "dream sequences" that illustrated the shattered mind of poor Alex.



Blood. And televisions.



A tableau Freud himself would have enjoyed.



As I find more of the ransom money, however, the timer clicks down, inexorably, toward zero. So close...

Sanity Falls

I'm not usually a fan of hunts, but this one, from MadPea Productions, caught my attention. Part hunt, part game, Sanity Falls places the hunter in the middle of a narrative. (See the two-minute trailer here.)

You play the part of Alexander Blackwell, a psychologist on vacation with his wife, Livea. The Blackwells decide to recharge their mental batteries with a trip to the town of Sanity Falls. (Why on God's earth would anyone want to spend a vacation here? No accounting for tastes, I suppose.) Alexander finds himself alone and relates:

“I’m waking up with metallic taste of blood tainting my mouth. I look at my clothes and see blood everywhere, but I don’t feel any pain or see any wounds. It probably isn’t my blood. I try to think but realize that I have no memory of the last 24 hours. The last thing I remember is coming to Sanity Falls with my wife. I feel dizzy, someone must have drugged me.

Groggy and confused, I stagger onto my feet and call out for Livea. When silence answers me back, I become aware of my surroundings. I am on the edge of a bridge overlooking the Sanity River. In the puddle of blood beside me lays a phone. It starts ringing..”

Livea has been kidnapped and held for ransom. Alexander must raise a million dollars to get his wife back - which he does, somewhat confusingly, by calling the number of each of the 50 "Missing Person" posters scattered through the town. The number leads to a SLURL which contains a prize, as well as part of the ransom.

The game requires purchasing a HUD for L100. This keeps track of the posters found, the SLURLs, provides hints for locating the prizes, and tracks the progress of the ransom.

The bridge to town

Welcome to the Sanity Inn

Cold beer, anyone?

I found about 45 of the 50 telephone numbers in fairly short order. Descriptions of the game say there are dream sequences that explain more of the story, though I have yet to activate any. As usual, I'm hopeless at finding the prizes, even with hints, so I haven't made much progress there. (Also, I got sidetracked with another project.) We're promised a resolution of the story, presumably once all the prizes are found and Livea is ransomed.

The game is a good use of the free-form nature of Second Life, the sort of thing that I wish was more common.

On the Hunt in Steam Sky City

If it's spring in Caledon, it must be time for another fiendishly difficult sim-wide hunt in Steam Sky City. I was the sole representative of Clan Jameson this year, as sister was out of town for much of the weekend.

I made a small donation to the RFL kiosk mid-city and received the Completely Useless Hints. (Though, despite Mrs. Volare's best efforts, I did find that a few of them provided some guidance. I'm sure this won't happen next year.)


This year's hunt object was a tiny clank, and many of the prizes were the parts to assemble one's very own tiny clank. Of course, that would require finding all the parts. Sadly, of the 26 objects, I managed to find nine, which I consider very respectable for a few hours' work. Please do not disillusion me.

I also took the opportunity to photograph some of the rebuilt city. To all visitors: watch your step, as several spots are still under construction, and a misstep could cause you to plummet to the water below. It's quite cold, I can assure you.


One of the new areas was Miss Magdalena Kamenev's Worlds' End, a cafe and salon. It's a cozy nook where Mr. Caligari's pub used to be, in the aft section.


The problem with hunts in Steam Sky City is that one occasionally runs into shady characters such as this one:


Beyond statues with glowing green eyes, one might just find zombies guarding one of those prizes. I arrived armed to shoot my way in, grab the prize, and shoot my way out. It's possible I killed a few more zombies than strictly necessary, but it lowers my blood pressure, so I considered it therapeutic.

Steam Hunt

The second Steam Hunt got underway on March 1, and continues through the end of the month.

I might have said this before, but it bears repeating: obsessive people should not do SL hunts. One tries to moderate one's pace, seeking perhaps ten items per day, so as to not tax one's system and to not interfere with other duties. Then ten items seems too few, the pace too slow, and, all of a sudden, it's several hours later and muscles are crying out for relief.

For those of you who might be less compulsive, the Steam Hunt is an opportunity to collect items of varying degrees of Steaminess, and to see a variety of shops - some familiar, some new to me. After I finish the hunt, unpack, and figure out what to do with the items I've collected, I'll have a number of places to revisit at a more, ah, leisurely pace.


Miss Emilly Orr has an impassioned rant on the short-sightedness of some of the merchants who participate in the ever-growing number of grid-wide hunts. In her post, Miss Orr laments the widely-varying quality of gifts, the difficulty of finding the prize in some locations (which increases the time it takes to complete the hunt, which in turn reduces hunters' incentives to participate), and, most importantly, the attitude some merchants take toward such devices as lists of participants and clues. I left the following comment:

I have participated in exactly two grid-wide hunts: Steam Hunt 1 and, er, Steam Hunt 2. From your description, though, it sounds as though they all fit a similar pattern and vary only in degree.

Your point about using a list of locations is well-taken. During last year's Steam Hunt, when I knew nothing of such lists, I made it through about four locations when I couldn't find the gift, and hence had no place to go next. As it turned out, the store had pulled out of the hunt and had been replaced - so the LM in the previous store was out of date. Without the list, I would have been dead in the water...and stores number 5 to 130 would have been out of luck, too.

It strikes me that 130 stores is too many for one of these hunts (especially for those of you who do more than one a year). I have an obsessive streak, and the desire to grind it out as quickly as possible is not a healthy one.

But you raise another good point with respect to where the gifts are located. I'd think that, in the spirit of fair play, store owners should make the clue difficult to find in inverse proportion to the size of the store. That is, if I have to search over Hell's half-acre because you have a store that sprawls across a quarter sim, I want the damn thing to be easier to find than if you have a small booth in a mall. I'm sympathetic to the idea that store owners don't want to participate if hunters are going to stay no longer than the time it takes for the search object to rez - but if you embed the item in a wall, I'm not really looking at your merchandise, I'm camming through objects and using wireframe view to spot the dumb thing....

With a smaller number of stores, I'd find it less frustrating to have to solve clever clues, or to look in obscure places, or to find a series of false objects that ultimately lead to the real gift. I've seen some on the Steam Hunt that have been quite clever indeed, but my admiration is dampened a bit by the thought that I have another 100+ stores to go.

Finally, I don't understand the objection to hints at all. I thought the most effective placements of all were those near an item for sale in the store - not under the stairs, not embedded in a wall, or under a decorative object - in which a clever clue led the hunter to the prize. I have to look at your merchandise to see if it fits the hint - and isn't looking at the merchandise the benefit that the store owner gets?

I think I'll go find a deep-tissue massage now.