I’m going to spoil an early-game puzzle here, without giving you the solution. It’s a little paradox I want to present because it truly embodies La Mulana.
Strength lies at the foot of Futo.
This hint is in an early-game area themed around the history of a family of giants, with their statues dominating each screen you walk through. There are a series of tablets describing their defining characteristics, so you have to find all that information, write it down, and use it to determine who is represented with each carving. Then, there are a few hidden ways to interact with some of them, letting you discern a few which seem identical. If you’re meticulous in your note-taking and experimentation, you can determine the exact statue that represents Futo, walk right up to it, stand at its foot in search of strength, and find…
Nothing. You whip it, use every item you have, poke at everything on the screen… nothing happens. You actually need an item from much later in the game to follow up on this hint, despite your best efforts.
Except, that’s not true. You need to activate a mechanism in the prior area first, then the chest will appear, so if you’ve skipped it, you’ll need to go back.
Wait, that’s not it. It’s that you need to enter that screen from above through a false wall, then whip a normal-looking block at the top to break it, causing a chest to fall at Futo’s feet, which you can then open for your reward.
Actually, that’s wrong. You need to use a weight to activate an invisible mechanism at its feet. Turns out, every giant statue had one of those little invisible mechanisms, so instead of compiling notes and doing research, you could have just lucked out and hit the down button at some point while you were walking around like I did. So, I just went down the line placing a couple weights and got my reward. Zero thought required.
That experience is what it’s like to play La Mulana. You buy the game after hearing how much cleverness is required, how you have to take pages of notes, and how it’s obscure and gratifying. You start your little document, dutifully adding screenshots where necessary, and then find it mostly useless. It occasionally helps, but La Mulana is not a game about testing your intellect or ability to correlate information from different sources. It’s about running into every wall and being sure to whip it a couple times. It’s about killing every enemy on each screen at least once, just in case. It’s about pressing the down button on top of, and to the side of, any suspicious objects. The puzzles and tips are actually, for the most part, straightforward and direct. You can usually read a hint tablet, make a guess at the solution, and be right the first time. However, what you can’t guess is how to even interact with that solution, because it's lovingly crafted to be arbitrary.
That’s why I listed out all those false ideas. I bet if it’s been a long time since someone played La Mulana, they may have gone “ah, of course” at first, because each of those solutions are recurring tropes which apply to the majority of the puzzles across the game. It’s why, after dipping my toe in with a 20-hour guideless hintless expedition, I’m going to shelve it. For all the hype surrounding the confounding puzzles, it requires a shockingly low amount of logical problem solving. Instead, it requires perseverance, and I don’t find that to be a particularly engaging concept on its own. Video games are so comfortable to play that all it takes to persevere is deciding you want to, which means a design like this is forced to do whatever it can to disinterest the player in some capacity. It has to frustrate you, because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a game here at all: the central conflict of the player against self wouldn’t exist. La Mulana isn’t bad because of it; it has to be this way.
So, I’m just gonna stop here. I might have continued if the game made me feel smart or skillful, but I don’t want to annoy myself for its own sake, which is what it would boil down to. That core of the experience is probably why my little group has made a ritual of coaxing people (like myself) into streaming it. You don’t get friends to stream normal puzzle games, and you don’t get them to stream simple platformers, but you get them to stream La Mulana. It’s funny to watch people get annoyed, and it gives cathartic schadenfreude to see them fall into traps the same way you did. That leaves your choices for enjoyment being completion of the entire game, laughing at someone, or just saying "fuggit" and doing something else, and personally, I think my chances of success are best with the last option.
Strength lies at the foot of Futo.
This hint is in an early-game area themed around the history of a family of giants, with their statues dominating each screen you walk through. There are a series of tablets describing their defining characteristics, so you have to find all that information, write it down, and use it to determine who is represented with each carving. Then, there are a few hidden ways to interact with some of them, letting you discern a few which seem identical. If you’re meticulous in your note-taking and experimentation, you can determine the exact statue that represents Futo, walk right up to it, stand at its foot in search of strength, and find…
Nothing. You whip it, use every item you have, poke at everything on the screen… nothing happens. You actually need an item from much later in the game to follow up on this hint, despite your best efforts.
Except, that’s not true. You need to activate a mechanism in the prior area first, then the chest will appear, so if you’ve skipped it, you’ll need to go back.
Wait, that’s not it. It’s that you need to enter that screen from above through a false wall, then whip a normal-looking block at the top to break it, causing a chest to fall at Futo’s feet, which you can then open for your reward.
Actually, that’s wrong. You need to use a weight to activate an invisible mechanism at its feet. Turns out, every giant statue had one of those little invisible mechanisms, so instead of compiling notes and doing research, you could have just lucked out and hit the down button at some point while you were walking around like I did. So, I just went down the line placing a couple weights and got my reward. Zero thought required.
That experience is what it’s like to play La Mulana. You buy the game after hearing how much cleverness is required, how you have to take pages of notes, and how it’s obscure and gratifying. You start your little document, dutifully adding screenshots where necessary, and then find it mostly useless. It occasionally helps, but La Mulana is not a game about testing your intellect or ability to correlate information from different sources. It’s about running into every wall and being sure to whip it a couple times. It’s about killing every enemy on each screen at least once, just in case. It’s about pressing the down button on top of, and to the side of, any suspicious objects. The puzzles and tips are actually, for the most part, straightforward and direct. You can usually read a hint tablet, make a guess at the solution, and be right the first time. However, what you can’t guess is how to even interact with that solution, because it's lovingly crafted to be arbitrary.
That’s why I listed out all those false ideas. I bet if it’s been a long time since someone played La Mulana, they may have gone “ah, of course” at first, because each of those solutions are recurring tropes which apply to the majority of the puzzles across the game. It’s why, after dipping my toe in with a 20-hour guideless hintless expedition, I’m going to shelve it. For all the hype surrounding the confounding puzzles, it requires a shockingly low amount of logical problem solving. Instead, it requires perseverance, and I don’t find that to be a particularly engaging concept on its own. Video games are so comfortable to play that all it takes to persevere is deciding you want to, which means a design like this is forced to do whatever it can to disinterest the player in some capacity. It has to frustrate you, because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a game here at all: the central conflict of the player against self wouldn’t exist. La Mulana isn’t bad because of it; it has to be this way.
So, I’m just gonna stop here. I might have continued if the game made me feel smart or skillful, but I don’t want to annoy myself for its own sake, which is what it would boil down to. That core of the experience is probably why my little group has made a ritual of coaxing people (like myself) into streaming it. You don’t get friends to stream normal puzzle games, and you don’t get them to stream simple platformers, but you get them to stream La Mulana. It’s funny to watch people get annoyed, and it gives cathartic schadenfreude to see them fall into traps the same way you did. That leaves your choices for enjoyment being completion of the entire game, laughing at someone, or just saying "fuggit" and doing something else, and personally, I think my chances of success are best with the last option.