Welp, Dee as done it twice more with his most recent releases, Orbit and Uplift: I got there eventually but it took me quite a while to do it, with a nudge or three needed along the way (although I suppose I find that just talking about what I am doing is sometimes the most helpful part – more often than not in the process of explaining where I am and what I’ve done I clarify what I haven’t done and aha!…. that or I am just trying to make myself feel better about frequently asking for help from other, better puzzlers).
Oddly, both of these totally different boxes feature a freely spinning center piece in a frame – but that is where the similarity ends (other than Dee’s excellent craftsmanship, as always). Both look and feel great, as with any of Dee’s work in my sometimes humble opinion; Uplift has received some aesthetic comparisons to Bad Moon, which I can see, but really they both have that Dee look you can’t quite put your finger on but can still readily see. Uplift is especially gorgeous and I suspect that producing it is particularly no easy task. Neither box is an overly long solve but both had me stuck for quite a while, so my experience with both was nonetheless quite long… and of course they look great alongside their ever-growing set of siblings – delightfully, Dee definitely didn’t disappoint.
Orbit
In the hours (and hours) I spent going in circles with Orbit, I will admit there were times I was certain the solution must be too blind… I was convinced I was going to be annoyed by the solution but in reality this was not at all the case once I actually figured things out. You are given plenty of information and just need to bring some patient observation to make sense of things. It is extremely unlikely to just randomly open this box, although there were times when I was sure I was close (and found out later how wrong I probably was). This is the kind of puzzle where you really need to work out what is happening to be able to reach the solution. There are many puzzlers out there better at this than I, who may well have had an easier time, but I really had to struggle to get there.
Eventually I made some sense of the box and was sure I could solve it only to be confronted with a problem I eventually worked out with a laugh. Again, the information was there if I stopped and thought about it (and I appreciated how Dee incorporated something that in another puzzle may have felt disappointing but still managed here to feel novel… it’s hard to say more without crossing the line into SpoilerLand (which I’d say is like CandyLand but that would give too much away)).
Having solved Orbit I can now get through the solve in a few minutes – a testament to how not-really-at-all-blind the puzzle is, once you’ve worked it out; in my experience, a truly blind puzzle can stump me even once I know how to do it. Here, there is no way to get lost once you know where you are going.
Uplift
Uplift goes back to Dee’s SD roots with an SD-lite solve in what is an absolutely stunning circular “box.” It had me stuck spinning myself nowhere on more than one occasion, with a particularly delightful aha! at the start. I had spent a few hours (yes, sigh) going in circles, doing everything I could think of… everything but the one thing that would actually do something. I found a bunch of feedback that did nothing more than to distract me from finding my way into the start of the solve and when that aha! hit… you just gotta love that dopamine, bruh.
From there, I got stuck one or two more times but was able to get through the rest of the solve in a couple focused sessions. Dee messes with us as the puzzles progresses, causing me to fall down a rabbit hole or two along the way. Fortunately, I was able to get back on track without help, all by my big boy self. Overall, it was not a super long trek to the end once I got past that first wall; I managed to hit that last step with a laugh when I saw where Dee goofs us once more.
I know of one rather vocal critic of Uplift, someone who I suppose solved the puzzle quickly and felt it should have been longer (not a Karakuri collector, I imagine). To me, this first leaves out the importance of respecting the difficulty and complexity of physically producing a beautiful box, which is much of where the value of a collectible puzzle is derived. If you only care about how long it takes you to solve something, than you may not appreciate puzzles like Karakuri’s, for example, which, to some, may be solved quickly – I care more about the elegance of a solve, the flow from step to step, how it integrates with a novel aesthetic built with immense care… although I suppose it may be easy for me to say, since I rarely solve anything quickly (I never claimed to be smart… just circumlocutory and loquacious 😉
But, really, I do not want to give the impression that Uplift is a short puzzle; I don’t like giving a step count unless asked but, by my count, the length of the solve is about average (in terms of steps) for Dee’s work. Most important to me, I was never disappointed with my experience solving it. At the end of the day, I may have spent more time on Uplift than on Walter’s Radio, which does feature more steps (and is one of my favorite Dee boxes) and seems to have stumped some puzzlers as being too complex. Radio is the harder puzzle I think, but Uplift really got me looking in the wrong direction on more than one occasion, which just goes to show you how random the puzzling experience can be and how subjective our perspectives inevitably are.
One of the great things about Dee’s work is that he gets a lot of feedback before releasing puzzles – between prototype testers and a few early releases, he gets a lot of information before calling anything done, oftentimes even giving the public a look into the puzzle from a blogger or two before public release (not that you should listen to anything those guys say, cough cough). It should be no surprise that his puzzles are rarely, if ever, the subject of controversy or contention (and oftentimes the subject of confusion).
Dee has brought us two more beautiful and tricky puzzles that hit different price points and scratch different itches, both leaving me with the lovely feeling of success that solving a good puzzle can provide. Somehow, Dee is apparently putting the final touches on yet another puzzle so I may be back soon… assuming I can solve the darn thing.
Puzzle Ramblings 