Portugues
Uxmulbrufyuz
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About the game
Uxmulbrufyuz only shows up at Halloween, after you have eaten far too much candy. You have dreamt of it before, always stuck and tongue-tied, wandering the lands around it without ever reaching Odosto, the place where everything is supposed to be all right. This year you are older, you know the landscape and you have better words for the weird things in it. Maybe this time you can make it through.
The descriptions read like tongue twisters, because in this dream every word in a place shares the same vowel: "Unburnt, unruly undrunk urnfuls." Each land around the centre has its own sound, and to get past it you have to say the one word it is waiting for. Ordinary adventure verbs hardly matter here; the puzzle is the language.
Andrew Schultz wrote it in under three hours for the Petite Mort division of EctoComp 2017, a Halloween competition for very short games, and reused a name he had once planned for The Problems Compound. It takes a few minutes to play, or longer if the words resist.
Playing it here
Click Play now. After the opening paragraph the game waits for a key press
before going on; then type a word after the > prompt and press Enter. The game
is in English, and a good vocabulary helps.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north, south, east, west (or n, s, e, w) |
travel between the lands |
| a single word | try it as the answer for the place you are in |
think |
show the shape of the word you need, such as u-u--- |
| an empty command (just Enter) | a slightly different clue |
| any unknown verb | the list of things you can do here |
about |
the author's notes |
wake |
wake up, which ends the game |
A few things worth knowing
Read the descriptions aloud. Every word in a place follows the same vowel pattern, and the word you are looking for does too.
Use THINK. The dashes give the length of the word and the letters it already shows, which narrows things down quickly.
The middle comes last. Odosto pushes you back at first; the lands to the north, south and east are where to begin.
It is short on purpose. There are only a handful of words to find, so try plenty of guesses.
Credits and licence
Uxmulbrufyuz was written by Andrew Schultz for EctoComp 2017; the release served here is the one in the package on the author's itch.io page. The author dedicated the game to the public domain under Creative Commons Zero, and its source code is in the game's repository on GitHub. The cover image in the original file is not covered by the dedication and is not distributed here. The licence text is linked from this page.