It occurs to me that my thoughts in that post about “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” derive not only from that essay I wrote about puzzles and gymnastics but from something else I wrote in 2023—a postmortem for The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls. If you haven’t played that game, HOO BOY, YOU ARE IN FOR A TREAT. Go play it. Don’t worry about this post.

I recently participated in a one-on-one interactive fiction competition in which I served as Iron Chef Inform 7. The prompt was “a scroll that alters the world around it,” and I wrote a game called “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” which, if you haven’t played it, you will find much more interesting than this dumb post.

You should definitely play the game before reading this, and you should probably also read this post about puzzles and this post about Metroid beforehand for the sake of rhetorical cohesion.

I recently participated in a one-on-one interactive fiction competition in which I served as Iron Chef Inform 7. I wrote a game called “The Van der Nagel Papyrus” which, if you haven’t played it, you will find much more interesting than this dumb post.

I wrote something to wrap up my thoughts on “The Van der Nagel Papyrus,” and I was about to post it here, but it occurred to me that some of those thoughts proceeded from something else I wrote about five years ago. So, let us turn back the clock…