Jigsaw (video game)

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It's a quarter to midnight on New Year's Eve, 1999, and you're at Century Park, avoiding the crowds that have gathered there to celebrate the incoming millennium. On a whim, you decide to follow a mysterious and attractive stranger... and wind up on a journey through time, collecting puzzle pieces and foiling the plans of an adversary who is trying to change the outcome of some of the most important events of the 20th century. Complicating matters further is the fact that this adversary is the very attractive stranger you encountered earlier...

Jigsaw is a work of Interactive Fiction by Graham Nelson and can be found here.

Tropes used in Jigsaw (video game) include:

• Alternate History: Black is implied to come from an alternate timeline where a number of things went worse than they did for us.
• Butterfly of Doom
• Dating Catwoman
• Enemy Mine: The player and Black aren't always on opposite sides.
• Featureless Protagonist: The player character.
• Gender Neutral Writing: In regards to both Black and the player.
• Guide Dang It: Some of the puzzle solutions are a little... esoteric.
  • Including one of the very first puzzles...
• Intangible Time Travel: The beginning of the Enigma chapter.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Yes, in the figurative sense as well as the literal.
• Newspaper Dating: Used in many of the chapters, often to give a general idea of what the chapter's about as well as for the actual date.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: What Black is trying to do, and the player is trying to prevent Black from doing. Usually.
• "Shut Up" Kiss: ... is actually the solution to one of the puzzles.
• Time Travelers Are Spies: Both Black and the player in the Enigma chapter, and Black in the B-29 chapter.
• Trapped in the Past
• Undercover As Lovers: In the Panama chapter.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Some of the puzzles may force the player to do research in order to solve them -- one, for example, requires at least a basic knowledge of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and the episode with the Enigma machine doesn't explain quite as much as one might hope about how said machine works.
• White and Grey Morality: Black (and Black's late mentor) is less a villain than a misguided idealist who is willing to use questionable means to achieve the desired ends.