I like his optimism!
I know, the confidence, it’s admirable.
Time yourself, @Chronos
Well, the bad news is, I couldn’t figure out how to interpret the drip sounds. I was assuming it’d be a clearly-discernible sequence, but for a variety of reasons, it wasn’t.
The good news is, half an hour. There just aren’t all that many valid paths for any sequence, and so by just puttering around I was able to stumble upon it. For what it’s worth, the sequence is apparently low-medium-low-high-medium-medium-high.
Now to scribble down this solution and go find out what’s on TV.
Huh. Well, I guess that’s one way to do it. Can’t exactly fault it since I’d solved others that way.
Still:
The “proper” solution involves detecting two distinct sound sequences. One is the drip sound with three notes. The other is the long-term groaning/foghorn sounds with four notes. And the two paths trace those sequences out simultaneously. You also have to split the black “wildcard” bits correctly between the two paths, not to mention not colliding with the other path.
I suppose that to some extent, all these constraints actually reduce the problem space enough that brute-forcing (or random tries) becomes easier.
“Anitra’s Dance,” from Act IV of Peer Gynt. (“In the Hall of the Mountain King” is in Act II.)
Aside from the puzzle everyone thinks is hard, the toughest puzzle for me was one just outside of town that looked like a crosshair or the arms of a windmill. Even though the preceding puzzle lost power and had to be re-solved each time I messed up, I ended up brute forcing that puzzle and had to look up why that was the right answer.
Do you mean the ones that
correspond to the branches of an apple tree, where the apple is the destination?
Indeed it was. I didn’t have a problem with that type of problem in general, but my eyes caught the windmill in the background and didn’t catch the apple tree right next to the panel. To add insult to injury, I systematically tried the arms in exactly the wrong order – but hey, 26th time’s the charm!
Yeah, that one took me a few tries, too, though I did figure it out “honestly”.
The only two other ones I “cheated” on:
In the marsh area, there’s one puzzle with all seven Tetris pieces. I realized that it was a lot easier to just brute force every path that cut off two squares from the grid than it was to try to actually figure out how the pieces could and couldn’t be fit in.
And the side door to the shrine, I just brute-forced. I’m still not sure why the solution I picked worked, and the fact that the door moves when you solve it makes it hard to figure out after the fact. I think that something seen behind the door makes a Tetris piece in one of the squares of the grid, when viewed from the right vantage, but I don’t know how one determines the right vantage for that.
Oh, and currently 513+116+2. And I think I might have just found the vault with the last movie-drawing, but I have no idea how to get into it: There’s an opening with a grill over it just above the first puzzle of the birdsong area, and I think I can see something inside.
Also, @Dr.Strangelove , I did find two more maps, but neither one has any usable level of detail on it, and one I think is just a duplicate of the one from the boat. They’re probably not the same one you found.
I still have the sneaking suspicion that there’s an environmental puzzle viewed from somewhere within the developers’ lounge, too, but I haven’t been able to find it.
That was a toughie and I sorta stumbled on the answer by luck:
When viewed from the right angle, the rocks on the trail to the door can be lined up to show the path.
The one I’m talking about is kinda mind-blowing. And actually useful.
The maps I found were just off the trail of rocks through empty space, leading out of the developers’ lounge. There’s a puzzle you can solve to turn on the lights, and see a portion of the office. There’s one map on the wall that looks like the boat map, and another on an easel that looks similar, but larger and in color.
And without giving any spoilers to how to do it, can anyone at least confirm (or deny) my suspicion that there’s more to the lumber room than meets the eye? It’s just too easy.
How much more is there? You:
- beat the main game
- beat the timed challenge
- did…almost all regular puzzles, any tablet with a line to draw
- found ____% of environmental puzzles/reveals
I feel like you are getting close to 100% and have done more than me, assuming you found every regular tablet puzzle and solved them.
Wondering how much more you have.
Also, how would you rate the game? My brief statement when I beat it in 2016 was: 10 out of 10, one of the best puzzle games of all time.
I can think of critiques today probably, but I stand by it. It is stellar. Took my brain awhile to stop seeing circles with lines in real life.
For me the birdsong puzzles just didn’t work.
I mean I’d have to brute force a solution and then, with the solution in front of me, it still sounds nothing like that pattern of tones.
Made absolutely no sense to me. As mentioned, I’m currently replaying the game and I’m just going to cheat that section.
The two places I’ve had the most difficulty in my replay are the bamboo forest with the bird chirps (especially when you have multiple overlapping bird chirps) and the autumn forest over by the quarry/sawmill where you have shadows from the trees and metal gridwork. I’ve had to cheat on some of those, and on a couple of them even knowing the answer I don’t get how it works.
There’s another area I have a question about. I’m going to spoiler the question and I’m guessing the answer needs spoiling too.
There’s an orchard area where the puzzles look like binary trees and you have to trace the path to the apple in the tree. As far as I can tell, this is the only area in the game with a series of puzzles that doesn’t lead to a laser box? There’s just a gated area at the end with a shed-like structure with some anatomical drawings hanging up, what looks like some bonsai trees in pots, and a tray with a cut-up apple. I’m obviously missing something here but I don’t get the significance of this area.
After solving all the tree puzzles, it opens a gate— I take it you did this, since you saw the anatomical drawings and so on. I do not think this sequence is part of powering a laser.
There’s a switch inside the gated area which–I forget exactly–opens up the windmill, or maybe powers up the panel inside the windmill.
OK. I have gotten into the windmill, and there’s a panel just inside that starts the blades turning. (Which I assume provides the power to the sub-basement with the movie theater?) So if there was something inside that gate area that powers the panel in the windmill, I guess I found it. I just figured there was more significance to that area inside that final gate.
Speaking of the windmill, it’s toggleable. That is, after you turn it on, you can also turn it off. This sort of feels like it implies that there’s some reason you might want it to be stopped? And I don’t think it needs to be turning for the stuff below it to work, either. I think the only reason you need it to be turning is to do the three environmental puzzles on it.
I haven’t yet done the timed challenge, actually. I will eventually, but that’ll have to wait for a Saturday, when I have the time to just keep retrying it. And I’m apparently still missing 10 panel puzzles (at least some of that is the timed challenge and what comes after) and 19 environmental puzzles. I’m also only at 4/6 videos (will be 5/6 after the timed puzzle), and I’m sure I’ve missed a ton of audio players.
And yeah, it’s definitely a great game, that I would definitely recommend. I probably wouldn’t put a superlative on it, but it’s top-tier.
Any comment, anyone, on the lumber room? I don’t want to waste time figuring it out if, in fact, there isn’t anything to figure out.
And I just…
Found another movie (You know that scene in Labyrinth, where she walks right into a corridor that isn’t there? That’s how it feels sometimes, with the passages I miss).
Finally got around to the puzzle seen from the couch behind the castle.
Decided while I was at it, I might as well finish off the castle monolith. Which involved way too much running back and forth between the boat to the treehouse area and the undergrowth of the treehouse area, while the bridge from treehouse to castle was inactive.
I’m now at 515+120+3
And, I got the timed challenge! But I think there might have been some sort of bug. When the music ended, I hadn’t yet gotten to the two pillar puzzles, but they were still active. On the one hand, I’m almost certain that I had a run before where I caught a glimpse of one of the pillar puzzles, right at the end, but it faded out. And I didn’t get the achievement for the challenge until I finished both pillars. And the three puzzles above the vault were left in an absurd state, not showing solvable puzzles like they did while the music was playing, and also didn’t get their starting circles un-dotted. On the other hand, one of those pillar puzzles was genuinely hard, no way that I could plausibly have solved it even in the whole six-and-a-half minutes, and it did award the achievement and unlock the vault. So, basically, I dunno.
With that, I was also able to get another environmental puzzle. Folks have complained about it, but it was genuinely entertaining, and I think it’s somehow appropriate that the challenge that requires speed is followed by one that requires slowness.
I’m currently at 519+121+3. So I’m apparently missing four panels somewhere, and 14 environmentals. One of them is from the village monolith, and appears from the company it keeps to be somewhere in or near the starting area. Five are from the shrine monolith, and I haven’t figured out yet where they’re likely to be. And eight are from the mountain monolith. I don’t know where those are yet, either, but I do notice that several of them seem to include straight lines and sharp angles, features that are not often found in most of the territory governed by that monolith. The Tetris-piece marsh, maybe?
The monolith sides face the area the environmental puzzles are located, if that helps.