By the way, around the castle area I noticed the sun start flickering like a light bulb. Could be a graphical glitch, though…
Ok, I finally got to the elevator in the greenhouse. Comment away!
Also, I finally figured out that the 2x5 puzzle in the lowest level of the desert ruins isn’t actually part of the chain of connected panels. 
So it was already “active” and once I solved it, it opened the door that led me to the last few puzzles and the laser.
I don’t want to comment until you’ve done the escalator puzzles
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I’m done with the greenhouse, elevator and all.
OK, all I was going to say was, solving the elevator was a key moment for me…maybe it’s a different moment for other people
After solving the easy elevator puzzles, the last seems impossible. I was expecting it to be like every other game…maybe there would just be a button to unlock access, so the “solution” would just be aimlessly searching around for something. When I figured out what the game wanted me to do to get to the top, it was a brilliant moment for me.
It’s not a very tough puzzle. And wouldn’t make the top 20 for spectacle. But it was the one that turned me into an evangelist for this game.
Not sure I’d say it was my key moment, but it was cleverly done. “OK, that was the right solution, but the Saboteur ripped out that wire, so I can’t take the elevator from here. Maybe I need to take the stairs? No, that doesn’t work.”
It made you take a step back and realize what was happening, and why/how, and extrapolate from that.
Speaking of the Saboteur, by the way, I think I’ve realized something about them, based on the win sequence: It’s you. You’re in an endless loop on this island, and every time you finish, you get "It was just a dream"ed back to the start. On one of the prior iterations, you broke a bunch of stuff, in an attempt to break the cycle. Which just resulted in another cycle, with the rules of the island changed to make violence impossible.
Question about one of the late-game puzzles:
There’s a sequence of puzzles where you have to satisfy all of the previous constraints at once. And it seemed like somehow they picked a sequence that was maximally frustrating, so that every new screen required a different solution.
But having gone through that twice now, I think maybe the puzzle is dynamic, and it always gives you a sequence that requires a different solution on each new screen.
Is that how everyone else experienced it? Or did some of you happen upon a solution that you could repeat for later screens?
If so, I also wonder if the algorithm ever gets stuck and can’t come up with something new. Or takes forever because it’s brute-forcing all possible paths and can’t find one.
To answer your question:
I did a bunch of solutions in a Paint file, including the penultimate one of that sequence. When I thought I’d have to redo that section, I pulled it back up, and that same solution still worked for all but the last one (though it still only lit up one new screen at a time).
However, there is one place where the game either generates puzzles on the fly, or draws them from a fairly large library of them:
The doorway from the penultimate area to the ultimate one reveals a couple of puzzles when you step on a pressure plate in front of the door. But they only stay visible for a short time, and if you haven’t finished a puzzle before the time is up, the next time, it’ll be different. And it instantly closes the puzzle if you try to pause, so you can’t cheese it with a screenshot, either.
That’s not the only place.
Considering all the positive motivational philosophy you keep hearing, why would you sabotage your own dream?
So I’m in the Caves now. Or at least, the Cave. So far, I’m just in one big chamber underneath the mountain. I haven’t solved all that many of the puzzles yet, and some of them can be solved many different ways, so I’m guessing that eventually, some puzzle or puzzles will open up a hidden door to yet other areas. I’ve only found two exits back to the surface so far, both on the edge of the mountain. I’ve also only found one enviro here so far (The sky as viewed through one of the exit holes): There are some things that I’m pretty sure are part of another one or two, but I haven’t found a starting point for them.
I’ve also found more audio, and they’re pretty funny.
OK, I did open up one door:
I did the around-the-pillar puzzle, which opened up the area with the record player. It looks like it’s a timer: In the time that it takes to play a waltz and “In the Halls of the Mountain King”, I need to solve a series of puzzles, including some where I need to figure out which puzzle to even solve, because some of them are impossible. Part of it also involves a blind maze (you can’t see the dead ends until you get to them), which I thought might be the same path as in the tabletop puzzle, but doesn’t look like it. And if I manage all of that in time, it looks like that’ll probably give me another drawing with another key to the movie theater.
I did some other full sets of cave puzzles, though, that didn’t seem to do anything. In particular, the ones on the floor in the lumber room, with a pillar in the middle of each one that you have to work around, all seemed really easy, and seemed to all have many possible solutions. Which leads me to suspect that there’s some particular solution that does something interesting, like the puzzles where different solutions move around bridge pieces in the world or the like, except I can’t find anything that’s moving when I do them different ways.
And then I went back to the surface, and found a few more enviro puzzles, including two in the wildflower field that I had suspected were there and the second one on the quarry dockhouse ramp
Any difference between the cave audio and surface audio?
Yup. Specifically, the cave audio are all behind-the-scenes stuff, when someone recording a Serious Philosophy accidentally left their mic on, or the team debating which Serious Philosophy to include, or the like.
Everything you said in the spoiler was correct, except that the tabletop puzzle *is* the same as the maze
That’s something I didn’t figure out, embarrassingly, until after I beat the challenge.
As an aside, is that the timed puzzle that @Mahaloth said he skipped? It doesn’t seem too hard (I say having not actually done it); most of the individual puzzles are pretty easy.
Since last play, I’ve mostly been topside, working on environmental puzzles. I’m now at 495+101+1, having finished the monolith at the quarry. The castle and village monoliths are also pretty close (though I think the village might include some underground ones). I think, at this point, that there are only four environmental puzzles that I know of that I haven’t solved: In the surface world, the one in the symmetry boathouse that goes from a clay pot to a doorframe, which I just can’t get to line up; one in the marsh with the ferry-bridge where I just can’t get anything to continue one of the paths; and the one with the bits of wreckage viewed from behind the castle, that I can’t even get a spark on, and in the endgame area, solving the second test chamber with the bridge coming from the far side to the platform, instead of from the near side
Oh, also: In the starting area, You can solve the gate out of the garden as a panel puzzle, or you can solve it as an environmental puzzle, and either one appears to cut off the possibility of doing it the other way. I think I saw someone mentioning resetting it somehow, so as to solve it the other way? Is there actually some way to do that? Just leaving the panel-puzzle unsolved doesn’t do the trick.
I also discovered that there are quite a few that involve looking up at the underside of various things, including the village tower, a moveable bridge in the village, and the reconfigurable bridges in the treehouses
I think I rather enjoy the ones where you need to configure something in the world to assemble the environmental puzzle before you do it (beyond just finding the right place to stand, of course).
Yes.
The code to resetting the gate is somewhere in the caves. Doing so and instantly seeing the sun as part of an environmental puzzle was the coolest moment in the game for me and really drove home what I thought the point of the game was. It also leads to what I consider the real ending, which you’ve already commented on.
I hate timed puzzles and the panic that ensues ruins them for me. I’ve seen it done and agree it is totally doable. I was so fatigued by the end, I let it go.
No individual element is very difficult, but you have to solve pretty much every single puzzle quickly and cleanly in order to get under the time limit. I’m not sure how many attempts I made before I succeeded, but it was well over 20.