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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

Adding the time limit and actually making the clock go faster when a player is (purposefully) going off the rails is a sinister trick to ensure that players get the expected ending message. Clever that the programmer throught of these cases.

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Hmmm. I tried about a dozen times before giving up. I thought the game was broken before reading your comment.

Nothing in the game visually indicates that going back is worse than going forwards. As the level is symmetrical, the distance is literally the same. A one-way door, or crumbling floor, would have been easy solutions I think.

well you gain speed just picking the key underway instead of stopping and going backward

Theres momentum, turning around is much slower than moving forward like most games

But that's not what this game is doing though. I fumbled and reversed direction picking up the key and still got to the door in time.

IMO, the game design mistake here was having too little momentum. There should be an excessive amount of momentum, so the player immediately understands that the levels will be impossible if they turn around.

There's just barely enough time on the middle and last levels to double back even with the faster clock movement for going the wrong direction. Fun little challenge

I don't know enough about web stuff, but I wonder how much this depends on the system

I got past the second one, and oddly was able to 'sit still' in the middle while rearranging my fingers for a remarkably 'long' time (couple seconds or so, hard to guage)

For anyone smarter than me: I'm on Linux with Wayland and a 144Hz display, output should be synchronized if this plays a part

On the middle one they only check if you go backwards from the position of the key (I got it to work clockwise). If you continue on the intended path and then go back the clock won't go faster. You have to be fast though.

I didn't notice that. Good one!! Thanks for sharing.

Although there's just about time to make the middle of the message "fox".

I now have Braid theme music stuck in my head.

I tried to go wrong way and i was not able to do. Thanks for telling us

"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." -- Doug Linder

Well, I do always look both ways when crossing the one-way street where I live.

But not because of programming experience, but because of late-night Taxi drivers who drive like Doc Brown (https://youtu.be/vHake6w4Su0?t=17) and believe that "reverse" is some kind of cheat code that flips the direction of the road.

Also, cyclists.

"Three programmers come to a one-way street. The academic looks to the right, doesn't see any oncoming cars, and crosses. The corporate programmer looks to the left, then looks to the right, and then crosses. The distributed systems engineer looks to the left, then looks to the right, then looks up to make sure there aren't any planes falling out of the sky…"

"... the hacker looks down to check for landmines and footguns, and then runs to catch up with the rest, grumbling something about computer scientists and off-by-one errors."

The distributed systems engineer definitely uses a mirror to watch both directions at the same time while crossing the street. They've been caught by Time of Check - Time of Use errors before.

In tourist-filled parts of the world where they drive on the left side of the road (e.g. UK, Australia, Japan), you sometimes see signs reminding the tourists to look right before crossing the road.

London in particular has the signs ("Look left", "Look right") written in words on the road surface itself at obvious crossing points, especially near stations etc. So pedestrians look down at them as they go to cross the road.

One should really look both ways before stepping out onto the road though =)

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