The Name of the Wolf (and some general thoughts)

May Wolf was certainly something, eh? I may have overestimated the audience’s appetite for puzzles, but I had lots of fun making Except Those Lost Forever and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? Anyway, I mostly wanted to finally share the name of the wolf, show how to find it, and explain how it was chosen. I am about to show the solution of the big puzzle of the game, so spoilers galore!

So, when I read the theme for the jam—the Light in the Dark—I had that idea about hiding hint to the “true” ending as litteral light in the dark. I constructed the whole story and game around that idea, which is why I decided to make that VN a puzzle game itself (to prime the player into seeing that the last choice of the game is a puzzle too.) I ended up choosing to hide the letters of a name in sliding puzzles. I then added the maze part to add a bit of variety (and because I think mazes are cool and should work without too much graphical work).

After writing the story, I ended up with four sliding puzzles and four maze parts. One letter for each of them makes an 8-letter name, perfect! I just needed to choose how the letters could hide in the mazes to then choose a fitting name (the sliding puzzles would all work the same, in a way that accepts any letter, so they were fine). Now, let’s go in order and see those letters!

First, the first maze. I wanted to go for something simple for the first letter, so I thought to simply show it plainly in the entrance background. Take a look!

Some bricks are simply yellow! How cheeky. I intended it to be an E but some people thought it might be a C. Oh well, seeing the following letters will clear that up.

So then, the first sliding puzzle. For those, the idea was simple, add some light in the CGs and have them combine into a letter when putting some tiles next to each other. They were harder to make in practice, thanks a lot to sikyu for doing a superb work on these! The lights in the shadows, some were of a different color than the rest, so if you put them together, you get this.

That’s an M! So far, so good. Next up, the second maze has an optional memory to collect. Behind the first memory is a black gate, if you come back after lowering the black gates, you’ll find the optional memory. After it, Gabriel hears a weird voice, like the part of his mind who clutched these letters. They’re hard to hear, though, represented by the glitchy effect.

One letter appears more often than the others in this glitchyness, but if you are unsure, you can also check your memory.

That’s much clearer! Another M. It’s starting to become clear.

What about the next sliding puzzle? Well, the light here is from lamp posts, and if you align them correctly…

It forms an A! Well, EMMA is a good start. One half to go! The next maze was the one that gave people the most trouble, I hear. Part of it is that the hint for the name puzzle was mistaken for a hint for the maze puzzle. Oops!

That “code” is randomly generated at the start of the maze, but the 5th letter is always an N. The different color shows it as the light and thus the letter for the name. The code has eight letters like the name, and the N is at the right place too! This was the biggest constraint on the name: the fifth letter could only be N, E, S, or W so it could be included in this code.

The next sliding puzzle is a bit different, the light on the window combine with the logo on the sign to form…

An U!

The last maze is definitely my favorite, it was really fun to design (although, I kind of got lucky that it all just worked out perfectly). The letter this time is really hidden in plain sight. The final solution for the puzzle show the letter clear as day.

That’s clearly an E. That was another constraint on the name, a few letters could have worked, but E was definitely the best one, so I’m happy we had a suitable name.

Finally, the last sliding puzzle was cut in two so that I could have a bigger sliding puzzle without being an atrocious waste of time. Most of the lights we see in there are purple, but two are yellow, so…

The yellow forms the final L. And thus the name of the wolf is Emmanuel. If you haven’t seen the true ending, you can go type the name and see it.^^

Thanks for reading all that, I hope some of you at least had fun with the various puzzles of Except Those Lost Forever. I could promise not to make puzzles in my VN, but… the big VN I’ve been working on already has puzzling elements. No mazes or sliding puzzle, though!^^