Either this map is in error or the land is! The Fool's Errand

The Fool's Errand is a puzzle game. Now, when I say a puzzle game, I don't mean a falling blocks colors-matching game. I mean that it is an honest-to-god game with puzzles in it. If you've played the recent DS game Professor Layton, then you've played one of the very few games in the world that is similar to it. It was made in 1987 by one single man (since such things were possible back in that era); originally for the Macintosh, it was ported to DOS and Amiga. Since the creator regards the Macintosh version as definitive, despite the lack of color, that is the version I am emulating.

Since it has been released for free, you may like to play along. But be warned that, once you get through the early sections, many of the puzzles are serious ball-busters.

It tells, through prose, a fantastic story drawing on tarot imagery. I will let it speak for itself. But first, a word about the structure of the game.

Each section of the story is written on a scroll; for the most part, each scroll corresponds to one tarot card (though there are a few extra scrolls). Most scrolls have a single puzzle associated with them. You can skip this puzzle and go on to the next scroll, or solve the puzzle, which sometimes will take you to a different scroll. A menu provides convenient access to any scroll you've read before. This bit of ingenious design means that you always have several puzzles to choose from if you get stumped on one.

The game's "metapuzzle" corresponds to the scroll of The Sun; every puzzle you solve (or perhaps just each scroll you read; I don't intend on skipping any puzzles, so there's no material difference) adds one necessary element to the puzzle. Once you've solved it, you can access the last few puzzles and finish the game. I will show that puzzle's current status at the end of every update.

Some puzzles are extremely interactive; I'll solve these myself. But there are a number of puzzles that are more generic. Any time I get to one of those, I'll stop and let you guys try! Additionally, I fully expect you to provide input on the metapuzzle.

Now, let's get on with it.









And in a flash of light, an aged parchment appeared at his feet.

"At last! A path to follow!" cried the fool, happily taking the map.

"Perhaps," the sun murmured, "yet things are never as simple as they may seem."

But the fool had already run back down the hill and did not hear the sun's parting words.

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

The puzzle for The Sun is The Sun's Map, and right now it looks like this:



It includes the description "Be forewarned: The Sun's Map has been corrupted by a powerful enchantment. You may need the help of others to unlock its secrets."

Each of those little diamonds corresponds to one of the scrolls that are unlocked at the beginning. We'll get to them in due time. Clicking on them reveals some terrain under them, yielding this:

We'll leave that alone for now.



The puzzle for The Wheel of Fortune is a card game called Thoth, played with the major arcana. It's a two-player game, but the AI isn't stupid.



You are trying to get pairs or triples. The difficult part of the game is remembering which cards have the same attributes as each other. Each player is dealt two cards, one face-up and one face-down. Three cards are placed face-up, and each player picks one or yields. If you yield, you lose 27 points; otherwise, hands are revealed, and whoever has the winning hand gains a number of points corresponding to what they've got. It's not a straight linear progression of trumps.

The winner is the first to get more than 666 points. Just win one game to clear the puzzle.



In this screen, I started with The Emperor and The Sun (hidden), and picked The Moon from the three that were offered. My opponent picked The Devil, to go with his The Hierophant and hidden Temperance.

The Sun and The Moon are two cards that can make an Astral Pair, which beats the old man's Council Pair (made from The Hierophant and Temperance), so I scored.



There is a system in place to handle draws.



Triples are worth more than pairs, but either is worth much more than single cards.



My first game didn't go so well....



Fortunately, you can retry as much as you like.

Having cleared The Wheel of Fortune, the next scroll is The Archway, which corresponds to the VI of Wands.



A word of advice: any text that is bold is important. Make note of it.

The Archway's puzzle is the first of several mazes in the game.



Looks pretty simple, right? It's not. Throughout the maze are hidden doors and sliding panels, which permit motion through walls, or impede motion through passages, but only in one direction. They can only be seen from the adjacent space.





It's very tedious, especially since you have to navigate with the mouse rather than the arrow keys



Getting out of that maze takes us to The Pyramids:



There is no puzzle here, and it does not correspond to any tarot card.

After The Pyramids, we come to The World:



The puzzle at The World is a word search with 23 words in it:



I'm going to let you guys handle this one.

Here's what the Sun's Map looks like right now, before and after revealing the new tiles:





So, get cracking!

Is this game hypercard-based? It sort of looks it.

I found fourteen of them, but my room is too rank to spend more time on this right now. I'll finish it if no one else has by the time I come back.

Most likely.

I think there's one or two more.

One of the best parts of sixth grade for me was making hypercard games for class.

I spotted Turkey. It shares its R with Netherlands.

Edit: Nope, I miscounted. That was the last one.

This game is very cool. You're right that Layton is one of the few games like it, except Layton doesn't have an overarching metapuzzle like Fool's Errand does.

And the Fool's Errand is brutally difficult in some places. That too.

Also, a tarot game that uses the minor arcana = awesome.

(I'm looking at you, boring Thoth-crap Persona series! oh snaps, I said it!)

I loved putting together the map in The Fool's Errand. If I remember correctly, you get treated to an annoying flashing screen when you finish!

I had been planning on giving away which minor arcana corresponded to which scroll every time we got to a new spot, but the game gives enough information to make it obvious in most cases. I could leave that out if that one extra reader activity is desired.

Most of the puzzles give you that, in fact!

I'll assume that you guys want to guess what scroll corresponds to what card.

When last we left our hapless hero, he was faced with a fearsome geographical Word Search. Did you collect all of these European nations, some of which no longer properly exist?



After solving this brain-twister, he came to the Maze of Hedges.



"Wandering winds?" the fool wondered. "I cannot even feel a breeze!"

Oh to be young and naive. The Maze of Hedges is the worst puzzle in any video game, ever. I'll skip to the ending before I explain why:



First of all, you can't see any walls until you try to walk through them. That's annoying enough. But you see all those "W" tiles? Each one of them is a spot where you will be blown away by the wandering winds to a random spot in the maze. You can't see these either until you try to walk into them.

Essentially you have to try to find the way to the ending by guesswork. And thanks to the inaccuracy of navigating by mouse, even having largely memorized the path I still ran into each of those eight or so wandering winds on the final path to the exit.

You'll notice that the path to the exit is long and convoluted. You do better to hop into the nearest wandering wind and hope it deposits you somewhere relatively far along.

Fuck you, Maze of Hedges.

After escaping from the maze, we are rewarded with a no-puzzle scroll, The Maze of Thorns.



For those of you keeping score, the Maze of Hedges and the Maze of Thorns together count for one of the minor arcana.

Passing from the Maze of Thorns takes us back to a very familiar scroll:



This time, we skip the puzzle and move on to the Strength scroll.



I'm still not sure what the Equal Rights Amendment has to do with anything, but let's see the puzzle.



Oh, goody! It's a scrambled image puzzle! I love those.



Clearing this brings us to The Page of Wands:





This puzzle is a bit of a cop-out. If you hover your mouse underneath the empty spaces, they turn into the letters that you're supposed to type in:



After that grueling brain-twister, the next scroll is The Knight of Wands:





It's a fairly straightforward cryptogram. Solving the clue it gives us yields this nonsense:



And I leave it to the audience to figure the rest.

The answer is [Well, he began, I met a page in my travels and he was seeking the pyramids].

The key is that we know the letters A, D, E, N and S. There's only so many small words with those letters, which gives us a few more, including the first word, and anyone paying attention to the story text can probably guess the last word. But try it out yourself: it's not that hard a cryptogram.

What threw me off, is comparing the first picture of the puzzle with the second. Some letters are changed, presumably to their correct positions, but it seemed liked what I was coming up with wasn't matching what was changed in the second picture.

This is why I'm not quite as gaga as some for Layton. Fool is the gold standard! (Layton is still great...)

Whoops, I forgot to include an update of the Sun's Map after the last update. Here it is:





Now then. When last we left our dear fool, he had been confronted with a deadly cryptogram!

In the intervening time, it seems, he managed to solve it.



Having solved this, he proceeds to see the Queen of Wands:



"Well," he began, "I met a Page in my travels and he was seeking the pyramids. I told this to the Knight who was searching for him."

"Praise be!" the Queen cried out. "You have brought me much happiness. Please, take this magic word CLAC and may it bring you equal happiness."

Eagerly, the fool wrote down the magic word and skipped out of the castle merrily.



In the puzzle for the Queen of Wands, you must rearrange all of these letters except the center one so that each column and each row contains a real English word. There are several solutions, of course. Get to work!

And, lest I forget again, here is the current status of the Sun's Map after solving that cryptogram:





This was a shorter update than usual. I have set a goal of updating at least once per day.

Hmm. The Fool looks rather like King Graham of Daventry, in silhouette.

Must be the cap.

SIN
ACE
DEW

Yeah, I can see that. I don't know which deck the author used, and it's bugging me; I know I've seen that sort of Robin Hood cap'd Fool before, but it's not RW, Marsaille, or Thoth, which are the top three people usually pull from.

I think he drew it himself. The whole deck can be seen at the official site (warning: spoilers).

Man, kudos to him then. I've attempted it twice, and both times didn't get out of the initial sketching phase just cos it's pretty daunting.

A studious reader has corrected me! Apparently I can't read. It says right at the top of that page, "Illustrated with tarot cards by Brad Parker."

Nevertheless, it was apparently made specifically for the game.

Let's proceed, then.



The solution you provided is correct! And you can't see it in this screenshot, but the "S" in the top left flashes quite conspicuously. It features again in the next, puzzle-free scroll, The Wand:



Moving on from The Wand brings us back to the hated Maze of Hedges. Skipping that scroll takes us to another we've seen, and another, but eventually we get to the unsolved scroll Temperance:



This is the puzzle that the fool must solve there:



It's a Jumble, and an insultingly easy one. There are six words, but they are given just one at a time (otherwise I'd make you guys do it. This part of the game has a high concentration of paper-style puzzles). After identifying what on earth OWDO, EOZRBN, AEPRP, LSERIV, TLEREHA, and IOURQUTES could possibly mean, we are rewarded with this cryptic phrase:



RED URN, which is significant in the next scroll, The Canopy.



At The Canopy, we get to do... another word search! There are 23 words, as before.



I'll just leave you to it, then.

Before I forget, here is what the Sun's Map looks like at this point:

At the end, when we put together the Sun's Map (if you're going to make us do that), you should show us the five menus.

Merus has played this game before, can you tell.

The menus are, of course, just a listing of the scrolls that you can access, but they certainly are a sight when they're all filled in.

They're also a hint for the Sun's Map, is what I'm driving at. But I'll stop being a back-seat player.

I actually don't think the game was done in Hypercard. It feels a little too close to the system. 3 in Three certainly wasn't done in Hypercard.

And I love this game. The metapuzzle is just awesome. And I obviously love the followup as well.

Apparently The Fool And His Money is actually done, and will be released on April Fool's Day, too.

I love old Mac graphics. They have some undefinable charm that I've run into few other places.