Robot roommate
How to play Robot roommate
You share a flat with a robot that does exactly what you say, word for word. Every day brings five chores, the same five for everyone, such as feeding the cat, making the bed or taking out the rubbish. For each chore you get four ways to say it. Three of them have a hole a literal mind will fall straight through, and one is airtight. Pick the phrasing you trust and the robot rolls off to do it in a short scene in the flat. Either the chore gets done, or you get a precise and very calm disaster with a one line log entry from the robot, and the airtight version so you can see what you missed. Five chores give a score out of five, a streak and a verdict on the state of the flat, from Spotless down to Insurance claim. Endless mode keeps serving chores from the full bank of sixty four until the robot has caused three disasters.
Tips
- Look for what the phrasing leaves out: how much, where to, and when to stop
- Small words do a lot of damage. Up, out, on, off and set can each be read more than one way
- Length is no clue. Some airtight phrasings are short and some traps are long and very specific about the wrong thing
- The order of the four phrasings is shuffled, so the safe one can be in any spot
- On a keyboard, press 1 to 4 to choose and Enter to skip the scene
- Save your daily result as a share card with five squares from the end screen. It never shows which chores you had
About Robot roommate
Robot roommate is a puzzle about wording. Every chore has one phrasing that leaves no room for creative reading, and the fun is in spotting the gaps in the other three before the robot finds them for you. The idea of a helper that does what you said rather than what you meant is much older than computers: in Goethe's 1797 ballad about a sorcerer's apprentice, an enchanted broom fetches water and simply keeps going. Here the stakes are much lower. The robot is a well meaning household appliance, the worst it ever does is make a mess and the cat always comes out fine. The robot, the cat, the flat and every scene are drawn in code in a flat cartoon style made for this game, and all sixty four chores, two hundred and fifty six phrasings and log entries were written for it. Sounds are synthesised in your browser.
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