I’d say it was much more enjoyable this time around, though that’s probably mostly due to the fact that the solutions to most of the puzzles were still somewhat fresh in my mind (I think I last beat it in early March of this year). My initial reaction upon playing this game for the first time was torn, perhaps more so than for any other game.  I thought the artwork was stunning, the story was at least somewhat intriguing, and the music was phenomenal.  On the other hand, the gameplay was often incredibly frustrating; many of the puzzles were extremely non-intuitive, and your movement speed (combined with the amount of backtracking required and the fact that it was often easy to forget things and have to cross each room multiple times) made things really annoying.  Knowing how to do at least some of the puzzles immensely helped the “flow” of the game and allowed me to sit back and taken in the artwork (and its many subtleties) more thoroughly, which I think is important for this game.  That’s really where most of its strong points lie, and I think it’s easy to miss out on some of those when you’re playing it for the first time.

That being said, the gameplay still grinds my gears.

So I checked to see if I had all the ingredients: the dry ones, the wet ones, maple syrup.  I did.

Feeling kinda lazy I thought I’d make the pancake mix then, so I’d just have to throw in the wet ingredients in the morning.  So that is what I did.

I got up this morning all excited, went into the kitchen and started making pancakes.  These came out better than any batch I’ve made before (albeit I’ve only been making pancakes from scratch for about two months now, and only once every few weeks).  Even the first one, which I always seem to fuck up somehow; I don’t know if it’s a matter of not letting the pan heat up enough or what, but it always comes out messier than the following ones.  Not today though.

So I finished the first one, transferred it to my plate, and went to grab the maple syrup… only to find it was gone.  The same bottle that was there literally six hours ago.  Just gone.  I looked everywhere in the kitchen, and it was nowhere to be found.

Despite being frustrated by this, I ended up just eating my pancakes dry with strawberries, and honestly they turned out just fine that way.  And I have leftovers for later!

The only part of this that I still can’t get over is that there is a 99% chance that right now, somewhere in this house, one of my roommates is keeping the bottle of syrup in their bedroom.  Whyyy.