Volume One
Intro Documents
Though Mary Shelley is a relatively well-known figure, the average person knows little else about her other than that she wrote Frankenstein. Given that her famous novel barely features in our game at all, we knew we would need to establish a bit more of her biography before players dived in. In order to do that, and to justify the existence of our game in the first place, we decided to create a framing device.
A framing device is a metanarrative tool in which the story being told is actively flagged as such.
Normal Story Intro: “When I was a child, I met a mermaid.”
Framed Story Intro: “I’d been traveling for weeks when I finally reached a small fishing village on the coast of Amalfi. Thirsty from the day’s ride, I entered the first tavern I saw and sat down at the bar. Without introducing himself, an old man a few stools over began to speak. ‘When I was a child,’ he said in a creaky and somewhat sinister voice, ‘I met a mermaid…’”
The advantage of a framing device is that it creates a pleasant doubt in the mind of the reader—is this story true or false? It also forges a bond between the reader and the (initial) narrator, who becomes a proxy for our own ignorance of what’s to come.
The framing device of Mother of Frankenstein is that we, the players, have just won an auction (at the fictional “Notheby’s,” a not-so subtle play on Sotheby’s) for The Shelley Volumes, a collection of hollowed-out books left by Mary Shelley to her son, Florence. This frame allowed us to include an auction brochure with just enough biographical information on Mary Shelley and her circle to get our game started. It is the only document (aside from the “Post-It Note” on the back of the final Valedictory letter that led you to this website) that exists as part of that frame. Everything else is either a part of The Shelley Volumes (i.e., the game proper) or else flagged as being composed by Hatch Escapes (i.e., the Start Sheets).
The next document you’ll read is Mary’s opening letter. This letter is long, taking up the entire front and back of the page. This length was necessary to establish the stakes of the game, but also to let players know what they were in for; Mary’s opening letter is an announcement that, like it or not, this game is going to involve a whole lot of reading.
(In retrospect, we wish we could’ve found a different place to put the more practical “instructions” that make up the back half of Mary’s letter. Playtesting taught us that our players needed quite a bit more handholding to solve Volume One than we initially realized, but all that text devoted to the puzzle side of things ended up somewhat undermining the character work done in the first half of the letter.)
Volume One of Mother of Frankenstein covers Mary’s early teen years, specifically her education at the feet of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin, and her seduction of and by Percy Shelley; thus in order to fulfill the third of our primary design directives—ludonarrative consonance—our gameplay would need to revolve around education and love.
Beneath Mary’s opening letters are three large envelopes labelled Poetry, Music, and Astronomy. As per our second design directive, these puzzles directly correspond to three subjects Mary certainly would have studied as a child. Within each envelope is a puzzle related to the subject at hand as well as five love letters sent between Mary and Percy.
At last, the puzzling can begin.
Poetry
We here at Hatch like to think of puzzles as falling into two rough categories. The first is what we call epiphany puzzles. They’re the ones you stare at, uncomprehending, for minutes on end, not even knowing where to begin. And then, suddenly, the curtains part and the skies clear—eureka! You see the answer and can solve the puzzle almost immediately. Escape rooms tend to lean heavily on epiphany puzzles, as they solve quickly, so you can pack a lot of them into an hour-long experience.
The second and more satisfying variety is what we think of as a process puzzle. Process puzzles don’t have one simple answer, but instead ask you to engage with a more complex and time-consuming process. An individual cryptic crossword clue is an epiphany puzzle; the combination of all the clues on the board is a process puzzle. In this way, all good process puzzles are actually made up of lots of small epiphany puzzles. The best of these are also iterative, meaning each miniature solve informs future solves, with new wrinkles and challenges introduced along the way. A Sudoku is a process puzzle, with each square representing a tiny epiphany, but a book of basic Sudoku puzzles doesn’t iterate, so there isn’t any fresh joy to be found in solving many of them in a row.
With Mother of Frankenstein, we strived always to design diegetic and ludonarratively consonant iterative process-based puzzles. Jeez, that’s a mouthful.
We always intended for Poetry to be the easiest of the three assignments contained within Volume One. It’s a light process puzzle divided up into three major epiphanies. The first is probably the most difficult: players must recognize that a month of the year can be found in each of the eight “traditional” poems, which suggests a potential ordering. (A tiny bonus epiphany is required for Dante’s Inferno, in which the word “dismember’d” has been printed with an extremely faded first “m,” creating a makeshift “Dis-ember.”)
However, one of the hallmarks of a good process puzzle is that as soon as you think you have a handle on the rules, something comes along to change them. We’ve put the eight poems in order, but there are twelve months in the year—where are we supposed to find the other poems? The second epiphany comes when players realize there are four poems in the five love letters included in the Poetry envelope.
Unfortunately, a new wrinkle appears immediately, requiring epiphany number three. Glancing through the poems, players won’t find any mention of months. Someone will have to realize that the months are now broken up into syllables and hidden at the ends of rhymed lines (“jewel” “eye” “sept” “ember”).
The real challenge (and fun!) of designing the Poetry assignment was in making sure that each of the four poems written by Percy to Mary functioned on its own merits, even without the hidden month. And in this case, “function” meant far more than that the poems cleaved to a recognizable rhyme scheme and contained the sort of language one would expect from doggerel of the period. Beyond those basic imperatives, the poems needed to obey that third and most important of our three overarching design directives. To maintain ludonarrative consonance, each of Percy’s puzzleified poems had to correlate precisely to its respective moment in the story.
To understand what this means, consider the following couplet from one of Percy’s four poems.
Should they ask us to leave, we shall simply say _____
Now a V’s been foresworn, we foreswear moving slow
The poem continues for another six lines, and perceptive players will notice something odd: the first, third, and fourth couplets all contain a blank—but the second couplet does not. Filling these blanks in with their logical solutions creates “No-M-Brrr”; and though it’s not a big leap from there to the solve—November—the question remains: what happened to that missing “V”?
The answer can be found right there in that first couplet: the “V” that has been foresworn. At first glance, this might seem a clumsy expedient, a post-facto justification for why the puzzle solves to “No-M-Brr” instead of “November.” But nothing can be accidental or random in the world of ludonarrative consonance, and the key to this mystery is to be found in the story. Once the love letters have been put in chronological order, players will discover that Percy sent this particular poem to Mary the morning after they consummated their love. Thus the foresworn “V” is Mary’s virginity, which explains why they now “foreswear moving slow” (because Mary could very well be, and indeed is, pregnant).
This same foresworn “V” will see its triumphant return in Volume Three, where it can be found atop the slab upon which Mary will carry out her “virgin” resurrection (i.e., a child brought to life without sex). It also does double-duty there as a homonym of the French “vie,” meaning life.
Cool, right?
Music
The music puzzle was the first place where the rubber of our desire for diegesis and ludonarrative consonance met the road of player capability. You see, if we were going to do a music puzzle, it couldn’t simply “reference” music while players solved an otherwise standard cipher puzzle; it needed to involve actual music.
(Side Note: There is not a single substitution cipher in Mother of Frankenstein. We think they’re lazy. Sorry, cipher fans.)
In order to create a puzzle built around the real mechanics of music, we would have to teach our players something about the subject. Luckily, this made perfect sense given the pedagogic setting; we would learn about music from the same documents Mary was using to learn about music!
Obviously people spend decades mastering music, so we’d have to pick a smaller sub-subject to focus on. We decided on rhythm, creating a document that taught players how to differentiate between notes and rests lasting ¼, ½, 1, and 2 beats. Because this was already asking a lot of our players, we would have them utilize this knowledge in a pre-existing puzzle format already known to them: the Sudoku (a grid in which all columns, rows, diagonals, and quadrants summed to the same number).
Exercise One is meant to be relatively simple, teaching players the rules of the game. Exercise Two, however, ups the ante considerably. First off, players must recognize that the musical phrases they’re being asked to place are not arbitrary, but fragments of the melodies one can find on the Sight-reading sheet. (NOTE: Terry would like it to be known that these melodies were composed specifically for Mother of Frankenstein. Sit down at a piano and give them a play!)
Once players have made the connection between Exercise Two and the Sight-reading sheet, they’ll still need to use logical deduction to work out the key headings of the rows and columns, at which point they can finally apply the same mathematical reasoning they used in Exercise One to complete the grid. One final epiphany is required to utilize the grid completed in Exercise Two, namely that even though each spot in the grid applies to two songs, half were already eliminated by Exercise One.
Having completed the first two exercises, players are likely to approach Exercise Three with some trepidation (if it represented the same leap in complexity over Exercise Two as Exercise Two did over Exercise One, it would be brutal indeed). Instead, they find the rug pulled out from under them—Exercise Three doesn’t have anything to do with the “math” of music at all!
It was important to us that all three assignments required players to engage with the five love letters contained within their respective envelopes. In the case of Poetry, this is achieved through the four poems discussed above. In the case of Music, the challenge goes up a notch. Exercise Three asks players to place four songs in order of “artistic importance.” At first glance, this seems entirely subjective, until we realize that we are being asked to create the hierarchy as Mary would see it.
We can learn Mary’s opinions on art by reading the love letters, in which she and Percy engage in a spirited debate on the subject. Once again, ludonarrative consonance is everything; though we may have fictionalized the details of their epistolary conversation, Mary and Percy Shelley really did fall in love over discussions of art and science. Thus Exercise Three represents the first time we ask players to engage deeply with the text from a character standpoint.
It won’t be the last, even in this volume!
Astronomy
Astronomy is the purest “puzzle” in Volume One, which is to say it bears the least narrative baggage (or “weight,” to use a less derogatory term). We felt that both Poetry and Music did plenty of that heavy lifting, and it was important to let players have at least some pure process-puzzle goodness.
In playtesting, the opening “move” of Astronomy tended to be the moment that gave players the most trouble in the whole volume. They have to recognize that the “View from the Earth” chart can be used to locate the various “planets” along their respective orbital paths. Once players have this initial epiphany, it should be a short leap towards placing the Great Comet and then using the second diagram (“View from the Comet”) to continue the process.
However, our favorite epiphany in all of Volume One comes a little bit later, when a particular drawn line passes through an orbit in two places, making it seem as if the planet in question can’t be placed definitively. Players have to make a large but entirely logical leap, realizing that said planet’s absence on one of the two charts means it can’t be seen from that perspective, eliminating one of the possibilities.
By nature of its very elegance, there’s less to say about Astronomy than the other two assignments in Volume One. But that doesn’t mean we’re any less proud of it. And isn’t that big astronomical chart just lovely?
Letters
However people may feel about reading this much text (we warned you on the box; it’s a novella with puzzles!), we are so, so proud of what we achieved with the 15 love letters included in Volume One. They are simultaneously a two-part act of literary mimesis (shy but stubborn Mary; sensitive but arrogant Percy), a biographical journey through Mary’s intellectual and sexual awakening, a juggling act of four simultaneous puzzles (making sure there’s info enough to order them chronologically, but also folding in the hints required for poetry, astronomy, and music), and an interweaving of puzzle and theme (note how the astronomy letters use the very subject Mary would’ve been learning as an ongoing metaphor: Percy’s feeling of hurtling through space lonely as a comet, Mary’s desire to enter the gravitational field of a new lover, etc.).
In early drafts of Volume One, we didn’t include the paragraph in Mary’s opening letter warning players that they would eventually need to put the love letters in chronological order; they only discovered that fact later, when they began to consider the riddles.
However, during playtesting, we learned we’d been just a tad sadistic; players would often get through the three assignments without ever having genuinely engaged with the love letters (excepting those required to solve Exercise Three in Music). When they realized they would have to go back and effectively “start from scratch” in terms of reading, there was some justifiable annoyance. Thus we decided to make it clear from the jump: you are eventually going to have to read these letters and understand every beat of the underlying story, so you better not skim.
In many ways, this gameplay moment exemplifies everything we were trying to do in Mother of Frankenstein, and we realize not everyone is going to love it. Most games in this genre tend to alternate between moments of storytelling and moments of puzzling; our puzzles often require players to understand precisely what’s happening in the story.
This final hour of gameplay, in which players are reading the fifteen letters, discussing the various events that took place during Percy and Mary’s courtship, and creating the chronology, are absolutely crucial to everything that follows in Volumes Two and Three. Even story skeptics can’t help but engage with the characters. During playtesting, we saw this as the moment players genuinely began to have their glimmers of real feeling—affection for Mary, suspicion of Percy, a bone-deep hatred of Claire (okay, so that was only some playtesters…but it did happen!).
If we wanted to have any hope of landing some bigger emotional beats by the end of the game, we needed to lay the groundwork here.
Riddles & Rings
Other than the two jigsaw puzzles, nothing gave us more headaches, both literal and figurative, than those freaking rings. We tried all sorts of different designs and materials during the development process. The rings were made out of paper, then cardboard, then foam. They had fins and turrets and slots. Originally we had players tie ribbons to little cleats on each one instead of drawing lines. We once spent weeks hand-casting hundreds of ring pieces in plastic so we could send out an early prototype for review.
Honestly, though the current iteration is the best we ever managed, we’re aware it’s not perfect. Those rings can be a little fussy…
Anyway, the last thing to be said about Volume One concerns the riddles. Or riddles in general, really:
Riddles are extremely silly. Let us never forget the moment in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy is on the brink of reaching the Holy Grail, only to face an Arthurian-era brainteaser: Only the penitent man may pass. The “solution,” if it can even be called that, is that Indy must kneel down, or end up getting decapitated by an impressively rust-free ancient sawblade.
The logical fallacy at the heart of this “challenge” is fairly clear. The test doesn’t reward the penitent; it rewards the clever riddle-solver who understands that the word “penitence” is acting as a kind of synonym for “crouching.” And as much as we here at Hatch love people who are good at puzzles, we aren’t sure that ability renders them deserving of eternal life.
So yeah: riddles really are dumb. They’re lazy, and childish, and criminally overused.
But…in the case of Mother of Frankenstein…we totally stand by our decision to use them.
Volume One concludes with a series of rhyming-couplet riddles for two reasons. The first relates to gameplay. We wanted to create a sense of momentum leading up to the climax. To achieve this, we needed a series of relatively simple puzzles, puzzles that would make players feel as if they were moving more and more quickly towards the finale. Simple riddles, with solutions pulled from a fixed set of 36 symbols, fit the bill perfectly, particularly when coupled with the mechanical satisfaction of spinning the rings and drawing the lines.
The second (and far more important) reason we were okay with using riddles—and specifically rhyming-couplet riddles—is because they fit both the plot (diegesis) and mechanical intent (ludonarrative consonance) of the moment. Unlike the Arthurian knights who designed the Holy Grail riddle, Mary Shelley was a writer. More than that, she was a writer married to a famous poet who often wrote in rhyming couplets. In other words, it makes perfect sense that if she were designing puzzles, she’d make use of lightly poetical riddles.
On the ludonarrative consonance side of the equation, we see the other crucial difference between our riddles and that of Indiana Jones. In the case of Last Crusade, the challenge is meant to weed out the unworthy by killing them before they can achieve life eternal through the Holy Grail; that’s about as high as stakes can get! Yet the obstacle built to do this weeding is the sort of doofy brainteaser you might give to a particularly bright middle schooler, to be pondered during the lunch period he plans to spend eating alone.
In the case of our game, Mary Shelley wants us (as a proxy for Florence, of course) to succeed. The riddles aren’t supposed to be some insurmountable obstacle, but one step on a journey we were always meant to complete. Thus their very simplicity fits with the overall ludic intent, which is why we ended up using them again for the climax of Volume Three. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.