frayedgame

Open the file is not yet found love after another the right game? So, also waiting for? Immediate action bar! Welcome to FRAYED, a game WITH! Sure you will find what you need.

Let me _know_

AttachmentSize
FRAYED.zip79.05 KB
FRAYED2.rar6.67 MB
frayedgameguide.html141.63 KB
SpindleyQ's picture

Has anyone braved trying

Has anyone braved trying this yet? I haven't been able to get to it.

Danni's picture

FRAYED.gam isn't actually a

FRAYED.gam isn't actually a valid Klik & Play GAM file but one filled with a bunch of random byte values (hex edit and see).

It took me a while but I think I kinda get the joke.

SpindleyQ's picture

The frayed.com file gets

The frayed.com file gets flagged by windows defender as a dos virus. The exe appears to be a 16-bit app but doesn't do anything. (crashes dosbox+win3.1, quits without doing anything in virtualbox+xp) The img and mus files I think might have something in them? But the latest knpextract uses the gam file; don't remember if I kept an option to ignore the gam file, haven't tried.

SpindleyQ's picture

Managed to extract the

Managed to extract the images from the .img file... I feel like there must be more to this.

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12.png1004 bytes
11.png1004 bytes
10.png1.01 KB
9.png939 bytes
8.png1.01 KB
7.png1.15 KB
6.png4.66 KB
5.png1.07 KB
4.png997 bytes
3.png972 bytes
2.png987 bytes
1.png956 bytes
0.png979 bytes
SpindleyQ's picture

Here's some MIDIs, too.

Here's some MIDIs, too.

AttachmentSize
1-pkmn_-_1.mid7 KB
0-5-race4.mid34.58 KB
sergiocornaga's picture

1-pkmn_-_1.mid is...

1-pkmn_-_1.mid is... terrifying.

SpindleyQ's picture

If you look at the file in a

If you look at the file in a hex editor, there is a hidden link to this Tripod MIDI page. Given that, and the cut-off name of the file, I have discovered that it is the music from Lavender Town in Pokemon.

Definitely creepy.

sergiocornaga's picture

No wonder this music

No wonder this music inspired hundreds of terrible ghost stories!

Noyb's picture

(No subject)

SpindleyQ's picture

Either way, I am pretty

Either way, I am pretty certain that @Snapman_I_Am is an important source of clues.

Danni's picture

Snapman made another

Snapman made another Halloween game?

SpindleyQ's picture

After some more research, I

After some more research, I have discovered that frayed.com is the EICAR Antivirus test file and is harmless. Weird that Windows Defender marked it as such a serious threat.

Danni's picture

No, the fact that Windows

No, the fact that Windows Defender treated it as a virus means that the antivirus is doing its job. All There in the Manual Article.

SpindleyQ's picture

Somehow this page got set up

Somehow this page got set up to redirect to this file? Anyway, it's fixed now. I tried playing the game a little but it kept crashing?

Noyb's picture

I think the game isn't

I think the game isn't really optimized for modern machines. Have you tried turning off the special effects?

SpindleyQ's picture

Yeah, I tried that, and I

Yeah, I tried that, and I can play a bit longer, but it still quits to the desktop quite suddenly. Is that expected, or is my emulator to blame?

Noyb's picture

Probably the emulator.

Probably the emulator. There's quite a bit of content here.

Danni's picture

Oh Spindley, you are so in

Oh Spindley, you are so in on this. You're just playing dumb so that people can play this, I assume. Thankfully, I already did.

Anyway, I had been waiting for this page to unbreak so that I could leave my two cents on this game. Spoilers below (highlight the text to see them):

I really like the concept behind this. In some ways it absolutely blows the first Fred's Adventure out of the water. It wasn't without a few problems, though.

In the first two minigames out of the first set, I had triggered the losing conditions on both. I thought the Tiki Monster was a scripted event that was supposed to show up half-way through and prevent you from being able to complete the totem at all. In the second minigame, I ran into the spider in the top-left portion of the maze. Still, it was taking me to the next minigame, so I assumed the game was one of those trainwrecks trying to take me through an experience rather than asking me to win something. It wasn't until the third minigame dumped me back at the first one whether or not I lost that I began questioning this. I ended up peeking inside the .gam file, and discovered that the first and second games actually did have a win condition. Having to do this sort of broke the immersion. I did love the trick needed to beat the third minigame with the rising slime - figured that one out on my own.

I liked the cliff-climbing minigame and how the sequence of required keystrokes changed after each checkpoint. This is one of the few times in gaming where guesswork adds positively to the experience.

The solution to the swinging axe minigame was way too arbitrary, mainly because I assumed the screws in the puzzle frame were merely part of the background, and I thought those arrows behind the slide pieces were referring to the desired positions or shuffling motions of the pieces such that they would be in the right order. Then I sort of gave up and avoided touching the slide puzzle panel at the beginning, assuming that the trick to the minigame was to not get distracted with a slide puzzle that had no actual solution. So I ran all the way over to the right and then played jump rope with the swinging axe as it descended below the floor. At that point, I thought I had broken the game, so I quit and then looked inside the .gam file again (grr) for the solution.

I loved the atmosphere in that truck monster minigame, but at times it seemed to trigger the lose condition at random. It would often happen when I wasn't even in the path of the truck - I assume the truck saw me around the corner and then decided to chase me? I was a bit confused. It also triggered for me a couple times when I ventured too far down the corridors - but I wasn't even close to leaving the edges of the screen.

The invisible maze minigame was fun if a little dull in terms of thrill power compared to the other minigames.

I almost shat myself multiple times during that Pac-Man minigame, though a couple times the ghost appeared too close to me and I didn't have much of a chance to escape its pursuit. I think the second time it got me, I was in the very top-left of the maze and the ghost appeared in front of me as I was orbiting clockwise.

The elevator minigame was pretty neat. The first time I went into the room with the shifting furniture, I thought, "Oh, it must be another one of Snapman's silly bugs/anomalies." Very tricky of you! I think you left a debug function in there - Space causes the elevator to operate even if you're outside of it. Then again, having that in there adds to the surreal nature of the game.

I saw QR codes at the end but I lack a scanner.

Overall, I thought the game was pretty cool.

Next time you should get the actual game out on or just before Halloween, instead of a few days after..

snapman's picture

Thank you for your

Thank you for your contribution to this online website. I'd agree if it were so (LOL)! Better luck for all. ;-)

Free Online Gold Farm Ski Equipment    Shopping Golf Dentistry   Used Concert Tickets

** SPOILERS, DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T BEATEN THE GAME **

My goal with FEA|2 was to make another game with a suspense atmosphere, but consisting only of puzzles like the flooding chamber sequence from the first one. After watching a friend beat that level without realizing he had to collect the bars in rainbow order, I decided I wanted to emphasize puzzles that couldn't be solved by accident. I drew inspiration for the cycling puzzle sets from Dragon's Lair, which sends you on to the next scene if you die, but later on makes you replay scenes you didn't complete earlier. The scenes have official titles:

Attracted Artifacts
Schrodinger's Spiders
Glitch Pit Flood Fill
--
Footholds, Handholding
Semiterror
Death by 8-Tile
--
Combination Chase
The Maltese Phantom
Blinding Wallpaper

"Footholds, Handholding" actually has three different ways of finding the key patterns to climb the rock face. The extra two were added because my playtester didn't even attempt to find a pattern in the reactions to his keypresses. He just started mashing keys, so I added a forced wait between keypresses. But players probably thought the white bar was being filled BECAUSE they were mashing keys. *sigh*

Semiterror has sound hints. Combination Chase uses Pacman pathfinding. Blinding Wallpaper is an homage to the screen "Blinding Metal" from Sepllbound Dizzy. The screamer face at the end is me! :D

There's two endings, btw. They're a riff on linear and nonlinear storytelling, in relation to a single play experience. The bad ending is the harder one to get, because it makes sense for the thematically consistent ending to be the reward for playing well, and it's a punishment for cheating (dying means you're actually solving the puzzle for the first time, instead of already knowing the solution from somewhere else). Speaking of cheating, I didn't realize just how many players would end up opening the game up to find the win conditions. I wish I had thought of that, then you would have found lots of hidden text saying things like READING THIS MEANS YOU ARE DEAD and THIS IS THE AFTERLIFE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT or HELL IS KLIK AND PLAY.

I wanted to publish the game on/before halloween, but I flat-out ran out of time. One week into this project I was a week behind scheduel. Two weeks in, I was two weeks behind. Just making all the art assets took FOREVER. I like photoshopping stuff, I'm just painfully slow at it. The malware/arg prerelease was planned from the start, but I ended up halting work to throw it together last-minute. The red triangle ended up as the progress screen (it worked out since everything is in threes) and the Frayed 2 Extra Advanced title is supposed to sound something like "Fred's Exciting Adventure 2", with fred/frayed/afraid as quasi-homonyms. It also abbreviates to FEA|2 which looks like FEAR.

It was a modestly big project that I've been wanting to make for the last two years, it made my October interesting, and probably less than five people played it. I'm okay with this! :B

sergiocornaga's picture

I'm really happy to have

I'm really happy to have actually finished this, it took a surprisingly large amount of time and effort for me. Part of the fun was constantly wondering if running it through TGF had broken parts of the game and rendered puzzles impossible to solve. Really hoping for a third, preferably in 2012 rather than 2013! You and Klik & Play work together magically.

P.S. This and the original are definitely breathtaking triumphs. Just sayin'. In fact, there's a lot of stuff that really should be on that list now...

Danni's picture

Re: TGF, felt the same way.

Re: TGF, felt the same way. Was actually pleasantly surprised to see the whole thing working correctly under TGF (except maybe the truck monster scene? Would like to get some confirmation on this).

Breathtaking Triumphs hasn't been updated in ages (like half of the site, really). It doesn't even have Pirate Kart II.

sergiocornaga's picture

Hey snapman, I thought I'd

Hey snapman, I thought I'd let you know I just managed to get the bad ending. Very spooky, and pretty enigmatic too (especially that last line). I was inspired to replay the game (and seek the other ending) by a friend of mine, who asked about my favourite horror games... I recommended both Fred's Exciting Adventure games without hesitation.

I'd so love to see another entry in the series! I was actually hoping one would turn up this Halloween. If you don't have any existing FEA3 plans, please don't feel pressured by this post, though.