Shrinkle – Shrink words, find hidden phrase

The "how to play" demo animation should show two words to demonstrate the "hidden phrase" feature

I enjoy the concept, and think you could be onto something - but it seemed a bit too easy to be satisfying. I think the path to solving the puzzle is a bit too straightforward. That is, removing a letter one by one WILL get you to the solution, and there’s not enough of a cognitive work-out to figure out the next one to remove.

I don’t have a solution mind you, but having made Stackdown and been on a similar journey, I needed the feedback to get it where it is now.

Keep going!

Oh, also I really like the tidy design.

Feels user hostile that there's no retry button. I can delete browser storage but why...

I find it very funny that somebody domain parked shrinkle.com and thinks they can get $6695 for it.

Fun, but like others have said, felt somewhat easy. Or really, it feels like the gameplay is too short. Maybe you can shrink down a word, then replace it with a longer synonym or something, and repeat? That way you get a couple rounds of gameplay per puzzle.

My only confusion was when I’d correctly reduced one word to the required for the phrase, but didn’t get any feedback that it was correct. I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t accept my “valid” shorter word

I was upset I couldn’t keep popping off letters even though I had discovered the “hidden phrase”. Give me the bubble wrap umami and let me continue whittling away until there aren’t any subwords left.

Would it be possible to have 3-4 words and you have to make sure that each word you produce results in a valid phrase? So not only the final phrase makes sense, but you have to navigate through a path of valid phrases.

This way you might remove a letter from different words and have to think ahead to decide if the result would remain coherent in order to avoid an error.

The computational complexity of identifying phrases that can be reduced like this while having a coherent path might increase rapidly.

Funny, but a bit too easy, I think. At least, I got a warning when I made an error (my only one), which makes light work of progress. The fact that I had only one error is an indication of the ease (I'm not a native speaker of English), and complex puzzling usually involves backtracking or multiple tries to achieve a single step.

Hi everyone, I am glad that people are enjoying playing Shrinkle.

I appreciate all your feedback and I am working to improve the experience.

Thanks

What is the hidden phrase? I suppose ”Plants plans plan pan” can be understood as a grammatically correct phrase, but a really quite odd one. I don’t think that’s what’s intended to be a hidden phrase?