Eight cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end.
John asked what 1950s bumbling criminals Drebin Sr could look good against.
Clouseau is the wrong shape twice — 1963, and a bumbling detective rather than a
criminal. The right seam is the Ealing comedies: The Ladykillers (1955) and The
Lavender Hill Mob (1951). Done as archetype parody, never character import,
which is exactly what ZAZ did to M Squad — take the form, not the people — and
which lets the gang be tuned to make Sr's twist land.
Five lodgers calling themselves a barbershop quartet, and in eleven weeks nobody
in that house has raised the arithmetic. A mastermind who is nought for eleven
and blames personnel every time. Muscle brought for the violence who offers you
an aniseed ball. A driver who cannot drive and came with the goggles. A
safecracker who is the best in the state and has been deaf since 1943, and has
been asking about that since August. An inside man who works at a different
company on a different street and has raised it four times.
The twist: they tunnel eleven feet through Victorian brick for eleven weeks to
reach a vault Frank Drebin Sr emptied five weeks earlier — legitimately, on his
own written recommendation, signing the transfer manifest at both ends. Arrested
inside an empty room. The paper calls it the finest detective work in the city
in twenty years and every word of it is true. This is why he has never been
caught: the visible criminals are loud and his own crimes are silent.
The case is actually cracked by a seventy-nine-year-old landlady who took a bus
to the police station to complain about the noise, and she never learns it.
New lint rule, from a real 10-point loss here: two DIFFERENT objects awarding
points for setting the same flag — points fire on the false->true flip, so
whichever runs second silently pays nothing and max_score goes unreachable. Same
object paying via `use` or its own dialogue is fine; those are alternatives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Act I, monochrome. Five rooms, 100 points, verified at 100/100 with four
verified deaths.
Built out of John's Police Quest material. PQ1's famous 8-bit integer underflow
is not an easter egg here, it is the central puzzle: Frank signs for a $40
operational float clipped to a note reading DO NOT EXCEED YOUR FLOAT, the back
room costs $2,500, and exceeding the float by one dollar wraps the department
ledger's eight-bit field to 255 — the terminal appends the cents column and
authorises $2,550.00. He keeps drinking to 132 because it will not do to stop
suddenly. Accounts raise it in March; it goes to a hearing.
PQ1's Gremlin runs through the whole case and is never resolved: chickens on the
Captain's desk, on Al's shoulder, on the murdered guest star, and one in the
winning freeze-frame. Nobody has said the word "chicken" out loud in eleven
years. No file was ever opened.
Then the stage: six memorised jokes, in order, and every "improvise" option is
fatal — plus a full glass on a stool three feet from the microphone, which is
how Danny Cavanaugh died and which you must not touch.
Linter gained the rule that actually caused this session's bug: MRPGI's
obj_matches is a BIDIRECTIONAL substring test over name AND synonyms, and
match_obj takes the first hit in array order, so an earlier object can make a
later one unreachable by its own name. `talk barman` was addressing `clubbar`.
It found two more: `sideboard` swallowing `cardtable`, and `bouncer` swallowing
`bunkerdoor` — the last of which shipped broken in Case Ten. All six cases lint
clean and all six still win.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Case Eight — The Smell of Fear (1991). Act II, full colour. Five rooms, 100
points, verified at 100/100 with two verified deaths.
The puzzle is identification: Meinheimer has an eidetic memory, so the double
cannot be caught out on a fact — he can be caught out on a manner. Ask him two
questions and he answers "about four hundred", "roughly", "give or take", and a
man who remembers everything never says roughly. The catch is gated on having
heard the approximations, so the player has to earn it. Accusing him without
that is a death. Also in: the Blue Note, the SWAT tank through the wall into the
zoo (which arms the lion that kills Hapsburg two rooms later), the mariachi
infiltration, and a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cable.
tools/lint.py: three of the four bugs that cost real time here were the same
class, and I walked into sets_flag-on-a-takeable twice — once in Case Ten, then
again in Case Eight after documenting it. So the rules are a linter now, not a
paragraph. It caught two live instances of that trap (case-08 blueprint,
case-10 wig) and a scoring mismatch on the first run. All five cases lint clean
and all five still win.
play.sh is now a case picker: bare invocation lists the cases and asks, or pass
a number.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
