Week 3 - The (Online) Magic Letter

This was great!! I really appreciated the different steps to the blacking out, I think it made the decisions around what to keep blacking out a lot easier for me.  I wanted to black out a couple more words after making this screenshot haha.

Greetings! 

Congratulations

the owl might be writing this

you will have unique powers with your words, perhaps even sentences. you will need instinct to interpret parts in this letter. the private words begin in secret. Yes, the eyes open on beautiful flow between each careful need if you sharpen enough. and until feels final, until you know your complete power.

I picked up the physical version of this game at Big Bad Con at Aaron Lim's small publisher table and was very excited about it. I myself had briefly considered making a game based on blackout poetry before abandoning that idea and moving in a different direction, so I was very happy to see that someone had more conviction than I and saw it through.

My favorite part of the game are the simple instructions that it lays out in the letter:

1. Remove all words that start with the letters of your initials.
2. Pick a number between 1 and 9, count forward in the letter and remove every word on that number.
3. Use the same number but count from the end of the letter this time.
4. Figure out the rest.

The rules are really simple and direct, and by doing so they free you from the anxiety of trying to find something interesting in the text. Just do what you're told, and then try to find something from what you're left with. By starting with a formula for what to get rid of, it became much easier to find my eventual spell. I might try these same rules again with other texts just to see what kind of spells I can find!

In the meantime, I leave you with the spell that I found:

recognize your future

start enclosed with quill as your secret declares itself

be proficient and remove each sense

complete your power

look forward