Invisiclues for Andrew Plotkin's 'So Far'
written by Lucian Smith.
So, you're playing 'So Far' and are stuck, but don't want
to read the walkthrough. You're in luck! From this page, you can get
to hints in the style of Infocom's old Invisiclues, which will give
cryptic hints at the beginning, and gradually push you closer to the
solution as you progress, until outright instructions are reached at the
end.
I've tried to perpetuate the style of the original Invisiclues in two
other ways, as well. First, don't believe every question you read.
Many of them are thrown in to keep you from getting too much
information by simply reading through the questions. Second, since it
used to take some actual effort to scrape a pen across a piece of paper
to make the clues appear, I have not included links to all of the
answers. A link exists from this page to the list of questions for
each section of the game, and from each question to the first hint for
that question. From there, you must enter the location of further
hints by hand. Usually, this simply involves incrementing the number of
the hint by one. For example, if you clicked on a link to
'theatre101.html', the next clue would be located at 'theatre102.html',
the next at 'theatre103.html', and so on. I apologize somewhat if this
is particularly difficult to do on your browser/platform, but consider
it effort well spent--the hope is that while you are busy typing in the
address of the next clue, the clue you have just read is percolating
around in your head, giving you new ideas about what to try in the game,
so that you give up typing in the address, and go back to playing the
game.
There is another way to read the hints, but you must have finished the
game first to use it. To go there, enter as a link the name of the
time Andrew says (in the afterword) that the dinosaurs disappeared. For
example, if he said they disappeared 5 billion years ago, the link
would be 5.billion.years.html From there you can read through all the
hints (including the fake ones) at your leisure, as well as join the
discussion I'm trying to facilitate about So Far.
A final disclaimer: The names I have given the regions below should be
fairly obvious, but are not actually from the game. If you think
they're dumb, blame me, not Andrew. Likewise, all the clues were
written by me, with no help from Andrew. Mistakes are solely my
responsibility. Feel free to e-mail me any
comments you might have about either the game or this page.
Enjoy!
Help me! I'm having problems in:
Below is a random number that has a little to do with how many other
people have read this page, and a lot more to do with how many times
I've checked this page to look at the following number:
This line last updated September 9th, 1996 AD
lpsmith
@rice.edu