IF Blog #3. More Intercom with Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It.
The intercom game I’ve recently played that I enjoyed the most out of any game I’ve played was Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It. Nord and Bert is a game who’s gameplay focuses on using puns and idioms and terms of speech to solve puzzles. There are 7 playable levels from the start that can be done in any order but the eighth needs passwords that you can only get from completing the other 7. I played 3 of the levels but I think I will come back to this one for sure
The first level I played was called “The Shopping Bizarre”. The shopping bizarre takes place in a shopping center with various aisles named after weird things like the meets aisle or the British Aisle. In each of these aisles, you find weird things that could line up with homonyms. For example, the first one I found was a moose covered in chocolate. When you enter in say a Chocolate Mousse the moose transforms into the desert. My favorite of these homonyms was in the dessert aisle where it describes 22/7. This confused me at first but out of curiosity, I tried entering the number into my calculator. 22/7 I found out translates to 3.14285714 aka pi. When you enter pie it transforms the number into a pie. There’s a whole bunch of things like this in the level and in my opinion this was the most fun level in the game.
Now onto one of the weirder levels “Playing Jacks”. Playing Jacks focuses on a machine called the Jack of all Trades. The jack of all trades can do many things like becoming a jacket, jackhammer, jack in the box or a jacuzzi. Basically, anything that involves the word jack. It’s a weird and unfocused one but it was fine.
The final level I played was called “Buy the Farm”. Buy the Farm was the hardest of the 3 levels as it needed to use many cliched expressions to progress. The problem was that some of the cliches aren’t common in today's vernacular. Ones like “teach a dog new tricks” and “make a mountain out of a molehill” were pretty easy but the one that tripped me up and made me look up a guide was “ Beat swords into ploughshares “ and the one that made me stop playing was “ Make a silk purse out of the sow's ear “. I have never heard these expressions before so that made everything very difficult.
Overall this game’s focus on humor made it a very fun game to play. The clever wordplay made me think real hard to try to progress further. I enjoyed the shopping level way more than the farm level as the shopping level felt more clever to me.
