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This low-tech text adventure is all about following commands instead of giving them. The commands are given from the perspective of a user where the goal is to construct a map by tracing the paths taken. Each room contains a single letter.
Some of the commands hint towards the nature of this map. “Walk off the edge” suggests that we are not on a flat surface. Drawing out some of the paths without portals, we can deduce that we are on the surface of a 3x3x3 cube. However, there are clearly more rooms in the puzzle than would fit on a single cube surface, so the next realization is that the map is not continuous. We are on three 3x3x3 cubes and the user travels between cubes through portals. Each portal connects to a room in the same position on another cube. For each cube, three paths stay on the same surface, two paths exit out of a portal to another cube, and two paths come in from a portal from a third cube. This gives a natural cyclic ordering to the three cubes.
Using information on whether rooms are visited once or twice, the map can be logically constructed from just the given directions (like a game of 3D Tetris, perhaps). At this point, the letters only serve as confirmation but can aid in construction. The path with letters PSI... is the best self-contained example of this.
Completed cube nets with the correct paths drawn and letters found are shown below. Paths are labeled by the order presented in the puzzle (alphabetical by letters found) and color-coded by the cube the path starts on (red for cube 1, green for cube 2, blue for cube 3). Dotted lines denote paths that travel through portals. Gray shading denotes rooms visited twice.
Cube 1:
Cube 2:
Cube 3:
Now we use the final set of commands in the puzzle.
Sort.
Letters on each cube face spell a 9-letter word or phrase beginning with A-F, which acts as an ordering.
Read.
We next find that there is an eigenletter between consecutive pairs of words, whose positions within the words increase. Reading these in order yields the cluephrase WRONG FACES PIPS. The F face that does not give a letter includes START ON X, which sounds suspiciously like an instruction by itself.
Cube 1:
AGEWORTHY
BROWRIDGE
COCKROACH
DRAGOONED
EUROWINGS
FRONTPAGE
Cube 2:
AIRFRANCE
BUFFALOES
CLIMACTIC
DAMASCENE
EVERQUEST
FARMHOUSE
Cube 3:
APOPTOSIS
BUSPIRATE
CALLIPERS
DYSPEPSIA
ENVIOUSLY
FSTARTONX
Remake.
Note that the marker for rooms visited twice is a black dot. This is a subtle hint that cube surfaces are actually faces of dice. This realization can also be made earlier by noticing the patterns of dots/pips on each face.
On a normal die the sum of opposite faces is 7. However, here each cube has two faces that are wrong. Their identities can be disambiguated by looking at the orientation of faces of all three cubes. Each face is correct on two of the cubes and wrong on the third. As a final check, portals from which a path enters from another cube only appear on these wrong faces.
Putting all the wrong faces together in the same orientations as on the original cubes, we obtain a final cube. In the below cube surface map, rooms visited twice are color-coded by face.
Then...
...we follow the final set of instructions starting on X, and taking the noted letters we get the final answer FAVORITE PIN.
Authors' Notes
As someone who occasionally gets impatient with text adventure puzzles, I originally gave this pitch: “[bad infomercial voice] Have you ever been annoyed at text adventures? Collecting all that tedious data! Knowing the commands?? Look no further. Here, you have everything you need!”
Turns out I am impatient with “text adventure” construction too. Ideation of this puzzle started in early summer 2021 for Teammate Hunt 2, but lacking further ideas I honestly thought this puzzle was doomed to die forever. So when the puzzle resurrected (in what was around my fourth last ditch attempt) near the end of MH writing with a nearly final draft and flexible answer constraints I was, to say the least, surprised. Perhaps the editors were too.
As a fun observation, this set of dice is actually intransitive with minimal changes from a normal set. This means that the probability of A winning over B is higher than B winning over A, similarly with the probability of B winning over C, and C over A. Not coincidentally, paths traveling through portals between cubes follow the direction of this ordering. While this property strongly inspired construction, realization of it is not necessary to solve the puzzle.