two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


Recently I went out and printed a lot of paper stuff and decided to write about the stuff I printed on here, and I thought I could do it all in a couple posts but the first thing ended up being way too long so it gets its own post. This is that post.


So you know wordsearches? Yeah, LOK is like wordsearch, but you're in hell. It's great! It's really good! Almost every puzzle both requires you to do this terrible wordsearch and to do something clever on top of that; in some puzzles it's this whole "expand brain" moment where you have to realise you've made an assumption about the way the entire game works, but if you break the assumption the puzzle is solvable. This happens because the book tells you very little of the rules and leaves you to figure it all out on your own. It feels like it could only work as a pencil-and-paper puzzle; sure, puzzle games like The Witness also don't tell you the rules, but they do verify your solutions, so you end up working it out through direct experimentation. LOK can't verify your solutions cause it's a book, and because you're the one making all the marks on the page it can also hide what it's even possible for you to do. There's all these little secrets to discover and it all happens above the page in your own mind, which is super cool.

There is an upcoming digital version of LOK on Steam, with a demo, but I actually recommend not playing the demo because by design it gives away a couple things that you might prefer to discover organically. Though the store page says "It expands on the original paper puzzle premise with new mechanics and paper-transcending twists", so I am excited for the full release to see what they mean by that. (Also it has a toki pona translation which was wack when I played it the first time but they updated it and it's really good now.)

Printing LOK: I accidentally did it in colour (don't do that, the colour is not necessary); I would also recommend skipping pages 88 to 104 (they're the rules and solutions, which you might want to avoid reading by accident). The way I printed this is kind of complicated. See, MacOS has this option for page layout called "Booklet", which for some reason might not be available depending on your OS version and what protocol/drivers you're using to connect to your printer (even if you're not sending the document to the printer and just saving it as a pdf). Booklet is amazing: it prints two pages per sheet in such a way that you can pick up the stack of paper as it comes off the printer, fold it in half, and just read it like a book! And if it's not 54 sheets of paper thick like LOK is, you can staple the edge and it's a relatively nice reading experience! The only problem with Booklet is that it adds a margin to each page I can't work out how to get rid of, and the margin is much thicker on the top of the page than it is on the bottom, which isn't really a big deal, I just don't know why it's like that and it bothers me.

The other thing is that I printed this on a printer that doesn't have the Booklet option, and for complex reasons also always prints double-sided by binding along the long side of the page instead of the short side, so I had to select a printer that supports Booklet, set the page layout to Booklet, save it as a PDF, go into that PDF and rotate all the even-numbered pages 180°, and then finally send it to the printer I was actually printing it on. If anybody knows of a tool that can take a PDF and automatically turn it into booklet-but-every-second-page-is-upside-down format, please do let me know. It's a bit late for me now but might be useful in future.


You must log in to comment.