[M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

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Bad Player
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : Ferdie :
Remiel: Maya Fey is a robot.
Remiel: Not a knife.
Remiel: ...Or a robot knife.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Ferdielance »

Spoiler : Not LITERALLY :
Not literally!

A piece of Maya Fey's body was used as the knife!
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : Ferdie :
Remiel: Enough.
Remiel: Neither Maya Fey nor any part of Maya Fey was "used," as a tool or otherwise, by anyone else.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Ferdielance »

Spoiler : Finishing up. :
(I discussed this more with BP in chat and he clued me as to where to focus.)

One last option remains. "I killed everyone..." You, Mr. "call-me-Remiel", are secretly I.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : Ferdie :
Well I already gave you all the stuff in Discord.

Of course, as we discussed, I also kind of logic errored... I think you could say there's a difference between reprogramming and downloading false data... and what you said you were trying to get at (reprogramming Maya to make her do stuff and/or using a part of her) and what actually happened (changing her memories) was different, but... I do think I screwed up, and it's not worth making up arguments to try to validate my mistake. My bad.
(I should have made the red only state that the solution didn't involve anyone reprogramming Maya in the inner-story)
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by astand »

Spoiler : :
I have a complaint about the following red truths:

All deaths were instantaneous.
I strangled Miles Edgeworth and Larry Butz to death inside the main hallway.


How can strangulation be considered instantaneous death, hmm? You have to press the victim's neck for at least 10 seconds even by movie standards.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Averia »

Spoiler : :
That 'I' trick was pretty great, especially considering all the foreshadowing when you re-read everything.

Also I tricked myself out of a robot Maya theory because it seems obvious ("Edgeworth is dead","Larry is dead","Oh and I guess Maya has no pulse") so it had to be a red herring.
It really was a trap, but one necessary to get past the number of people, woops.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : astand :
hey, we've had instantaneous starvation

now we have instantaneous strangulation too

...and if you don't like that...

maybe different people get slightly different versions of the EN? Phoenix theorized that they were strangled, but this was never confirmed. maybe for some people, edgeworth and larry were strangled, and for others, their necks were snapped? I'm pretty sure nobody got a red confirming both instantaneous death and strangulation

this is a minor point anyway tho
Spoiler : Averia :
Glad you liked it! Sometimes the best way to deal with a trap is to walk into it head-first ;)
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Ferdielance »

Spoiler : Review :
Looking back on this one, I would argue that Daybreak is the strongest EN we've had yet overall. Here's why:

Strengths:

* Tightness. Every element served a purpose. Daybreak did not waste time with red herrings. Everything was either a clue to the real answer, or a trap. BP followed Carr's dictum that you should not hide your clues, but wave them in your readers' faces. For an EN, this is VERY hard to do and still have a challenging mystery!

* Pacing. One problem of ENs is that they tend to proceed either to a frustrating dead end or to a long, drawn-out final battle. At least as originally planned, this EN avoids this problem elegantly: there are several steps to the solution, and there is a major checkpoint in the form of a false answer that ratchets up the tension. This makes the proceeding much less dry and more tense. The opponent is really an opponent here, not just a stand-in for "the solution."

* Audacity. A good EN should try to do something worth doing. Saying "Maya is a robot" is not worth doing in itself. "Maya is a robot, and we're going to play that straight and set up a bigger challenge with it" is.

* Cluing. The clues were tight enough to clue (most of) the actual answer well, but allowed a lot of entertaining false answers.
*** "MAYA WAS THE KNIFE" is not an entertaining false answer. It is the real answer because the culprit stabbed the victims with a piece of Maya and I refuse to believe any reds to the contrary.

* Comedy. There was just the right level of comedy here. The characters took their situation seriously even as it grew increasingly ridiculous, which is important!

Weaknesses:

* 'An Extra Person With an Improbable Name Who Leaves No Traces Except for Corpses And Is Clued By Process of Elimination Using Decontextualized Red Truth, a False Answer, and Wordplay.' I... I kind of think this one stands on its own. That said, this seems to be a basic problem of the Red Truth EN mystery format. Because the goal is to simultaneously challenge and play fair, it seems as if wordplay usually ends up being the answer, and hidden extra people who leave no traces are just a thing we do. Good ENs stretch the limits of the format... but that in itself isn't nearly as great an ambition as making a really good traditional mystery!

This is not only potentially anticlimactic, but problematic for character motivation. Like, what in-story reason (in the test-within-an-EN) does story-I have to do things? Who is story-I there, and how does he know that his name makes him able to dodge red truth? Is that a supernatural power - a knowledge of things outside the story itself? How did he know that Phoenix Wright would word his statements in exactly the way he did?

One of the problems of an interactive mystery is that the final answer should be satisfying. When a puzzle is solved, the response should be, "OF COURSE!" and not "That's... that's it?" This EN has the best wordplay of any EN so far, but a wordplay solution still will tend towards anticlimax if the other elements of the answer are more engaging. In a sense, the biggest problem I had with this EN is that the vast majority of it is much more accomplished and engaging than its actual, conclusive solution. It is a victim of its own polish.

Therefore, I think it might be a good time to make a death proclamation:

Wordplay solutions to EN mysteries are dead. BP has killed them.

Nobody will do wordplay better than this, and nobody should.

Scratches out idea for an EN where the central gimmick is that certain word pairs are switched in the text at every appearance, with a warning to this effect in the red, so Franziska von Karma becomes Kermit von Frog and Kermit the Frog becomes Franziska the Karma.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Blackrune »

Spoiler : :
Fine... you win. I guess the only way out is to suspect my friends at this point.

For now I'll shelve the robot idea because withotu an extra person it creates more problems than not.

Let's take Larry... because he is the only one who could reasonably slip out the storage room without "being seen by Larry".
As for how he did that while he was glued to the floor, well... guess he just slipped out of his shoes.

For Gumshoe... mostly same theory as before. He told him to turn around or sth and stabbed him in the back at the doorway. Then he pushed him towards the table. Maybe he already had the glue at that point and used it to make sure Gumshoe would be stuck to it. Anyway, Gumshoe didn't die until we entered the room as a group, meaning the killer was indeed in the same room when death occured.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : Rune :
Remiel: No, Mr. Wright.
Remiel: I do not "win" until I have ground you into a shriveling pile of dust.
Remiel: But to get closer to that goal...
Remiel: Let me issue some reds to crush this theory, and your spirit.
Remiel: For Ms. Basil's murder...
Remiel: I believed you noticed that Larry's feet were glued to his shoes as well?
Remiel: I still won't allow it to be that simple for you...
Remiel: Larry did not move from the spot marked on the map at any point while Phoenix was in Nanotech.
Remiel: As for Detective Gumshoe's murder...
Remiel: I thought I told you...
Remiel: For each murder, the culprit was in the same room as the victim at the moment of the victim's death.
Remiel: ...Although I suppose you are arguing that Detective Gumshoe was in the hall as well?
Remiel: Then I will issue additional red truths to ensure your theory is crushed.
Remiel: Detective Gumshoe’s death was instantaneous.
Remiel: No corpse relevant to the story is ever moved.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Blackrune »

Spoiler : :
... The logic gets more merciless then.

Killer was in the room when victim died + instant death means they definitely had to leave afterwards. Teleporters aren't hinted and dying would not work in the long run...
The only way to leave would be to not be a person.

So... You only ruled out robots for yourself.
If it's fair for one of my friends to be one, it'd still work out. I'm not sure if robots being mentioned is sufficient. Anyway, it couldn't be Lisa cause she died and doubles aren't allowed, so killing the last people should be impossible by any reasonable definition.
It can't be Larry cause he was truly glued in place.
It can't be me cause the detective is not the culprit and it can't be you since you can only be human.

That leaves Maya and Edgeworth.
Let's try Maya. What could go wrong? :larry:

Murder 1: She sneaks out, kills Gumshoe, and leaves.
Intermission: You, Remiel, are secretly present in the facility but ultimately irrelevant, just there to create the illusion for us that the five characters we see are the 5 people in the facility.
Murder 2: Maya sneaks out to storage, same deal. Larry is an idiot and doesn't notice her going past him, but his red is technically true. The metal detector does not trigger because she is made with high temperature superconductors that aren't metals or something.
Final murders: No pulse, no problem.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Bad Player »

Spoiler : Rune :
[click]

[Don't Knox's 4th, and the fact that superconductors are most typically metal]
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Mathias_Trueman »

A little bit late to the party, but just looked at Daybreak...
Spoiler : Theory : Daybreak Question Arc :
Right now the only thing I'm completely confident in is Gumshoe's death, where my solution is not specific to any suspect.

Gumshoe was stabbed (directly, by a human being) while everyone was in the room. His back was turned so they did not see this. He was in a state of shock, and attributed the strange feeling to his excitement over the gadgets in the room, and thus didn't know he was stabbed until everyone had left the room. He then died before anyone came back to the room.

From here, I'll go the route that Larry is the culprit.

For lisa's death, I propose that the adhesive does not work yet, and therefore Larry could have grabbed the knife from Gumshoe's corpse and killed Lisa with it, then kept it on his person afterwards. Larry could have found this out while in the lab, by using just a little bit of it on a napkin or underside of the table or something, and then planned on using it as an alibi at some point. Or, he could have ad lib'd the scene of him suddenly being stuck in place. While its possible he knew about the adhesive-removing solvent before leaving the Composite room due to Bluecorp's apparent open nature, or perhaps of both before beginning the tour, I believe that this was a spur-of-the-moment action and not a planned out murder.

To back up my assertion that the adhesive doesn't work; In one of her conversations in the Composite room, she states that the company is very confident that they will keep their promises so they aren't worried about showing off what they have, and I believe this to be a facade meant to fool whatever competition they have.

Larry's red truth about not seeing anyone exit the hallway can be simply answered in this case with "he closed his eyes while he walked to and from that hallway".

All that remains now is the blackout and the final deaths. For now, I believe the blackout was intentional by the culprit.

Given that Larry had complete freedom to move about the facility as he pleased during this interval, I propose that he visited the last room, the Thermodynamics room, and possible the previous two as well and started some processes that would overload the electricity in the facility.

He didn't need it to happen exactly after they discovered Lisa's body, as Edgeworth/Nick/Maya would easily start shouting to find each other and he could use that to locate them and kill one of them with the knife, then return to his position and use the false adhesive as his alibi. Even if he had to barge through the metal detector with the knife, it wouldn't matter, because no one would be able to tell what was going on in the darkness (and the adhesive saves him from being suspected of lying). He doesn't even have to call back out to them during the blackout, because he can claim that the true culprit knocked him out in the hallway or something (and again the adhesive saves him from being suspected of lying).

Now the final round of murders.

While there are signs of strangulation on Larry and Edgeworth, Phoenix does not declare them in red or clarify why they look that way.

Edgeworth was killed by Larry in the blackout after being knocked out. Maya's state is irrelevant.

Larry could have injured his throat in one of the rooms, or with some small tool, then killed himself in a discreet way. Possibly by drinking toxic chemicals from the Composition room, or swallowing a sharp object and letting himself bleed internally to death.
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Re: [M] Endless Nights - Daybreak

Post by Blackrune »

Spoiler : :
T-That wasn't part of the deal! Why should I suddenly be down to one try when I wasn't before!? And didn't you say we won't be held responsible... so even if I were to suggest this, it wouldn't be betrayal? Because this world is all fake! It has to be all fake...!?

(Wait, but if Knox 4th is in effect then this doesn't actually explain away the metal detector. I suppose she got past it those two times because the others always had a metallic items with them that disguised it going off on her... which means she couldn't have gone to kill Lisa. But... how can she still say she killed them in red? The culprit is the one who kills.... so even if she was ordered to by somebody else, there's still no escape since she said she killed them. That's... a tough contradiction. Gotta be careful here.)
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