And, to be fair, “In the Halls of the Mountain King” is a pretty good piece for inciting time pressure panic.
Oh, and +2 now. Also finished the desert.
Yep likewise. And it was a buzzer-beater when I finally did it. It wasn’t initially clear whether I had succeeded or just missed out.
I am 100% certain that was the basis for choosing it.
Argh! On my very first try tonight, I got through almost everything before even the end of the waltz, but the puzzles above the box-room were still inactive. So I ran around in the blind maze trying to find another puzzle there, while the music got more and more frantic, until emerging back into the box-room one last time, to catch a glimpse of a puzzle in there off to the side vanishing just as the last notes played. Couldn’t replicate on any further attempt.
It does look like a good completion depends on getting lucky and getting an easy one for the symmetry puzzle. Most of the rest, I can do without even thinking about them, but those take some work.
And meanwhile, I’ve done everything in the main cave except for that one stupid color puzzle with the degaussed screen. I just can’t figure out what the proper process is for color-correction on it. Some of the adjacent color splotches are just obviously different enough to need to be separated, but that doesn’t seem to be enough information to figure out the rest.
And I still haven’t unlocked any other underground areas, beyond the main undermountain cave and the record player room. Assuming that that color puzzle isn’t what unlocks everything else, I think that the key must be in the lumber room, with the puzzles that can be solved multiple ways, but I still haven’t figured out what the “right” way is to solve them. I thought briefly that it might be giving them all the same solution, but that’s clearly not it: One has the goals at the corner while the other three have goals on the faces, and even of those three, the tetris pieces are incompatible with having the same solution.
Oh, and does anyone know what the waltz is?
Yep and I would also abort any time the maze puzzle is a difficult one to commit to memory.
That’s what a phone pic is for.
It’s solvable, and not that hard when you see the trick.
A vague, one-word hint if you so desire:
diagonals
By which you mean that Any color splotches on the same diagonal are affected by the same color shift, whatever it is, and so you can tell if those, at least, are the same or different? That is helpful, but I’m still not sure it’s enough.
I did eventually come up with something that worked for that puzzle, though I’m not sure if that was entirely deduction, versus brute force and/or luck. Which means that I’m, once more, in a position where I’ve solved all puzzles I know about (well, aside from the timed challenge). I’m fairly sure that, to unlock anything else, I need to solve the lumber-room puzzles in some specific way, but I have no clue what that way is: I can’t find any changes in the world based on changes in those puzzles, and nor can I find any clue in the room about what a proper solution ought to look like.
Oh, and one positive consequence of this game: It saved me five minutes this morning. On my bike ride to work, I had “In the Halls of the Mountain King” running through my head, which apparently made me pedal faster.
Yes. Since you solved it, here’s a full spoiler:
The color shift on diagonals from the upper-left to lower-right is constant. You can also see the true colors peeking out from behind the left and bottom edges, which is just yellow and cyan. So you can directly compare any splotch in the lower-left board triangle against the splotches from following its diagonal up and down. There are just the two colors total.
The upper-right board triangle requires a little more deduction since there’s no edge that you can compare against. But it’s relatively simpler and you can compare the colors against the nearest diagonal that you do have an answer for. And again, each splotch on those diagonals is just one of two shades, so at worst you may have to swap your guess (though in practice it’s not hard).
Ah, I had not suspected that.
Well, I thought I had figured it out: All of the lumber-room puzzles have two starting circles, and at least two exit points. So clearly, what I need to do is solve them as if they were symmetry puzzles, with an invisible second line!
Except, oh, wait, that doesn’t work. I tried it, and it doesn’t count as a solution. Ah, well, back to square one. Or whatever square number those are.
I am still pretty sure that it’s the lumber room I need to focus on, though, because on face value, those puzzles are just way too easy to be in the postgame area.
…Wait a minute. Since when is there another passage in the back of the record player room?
With that, I’ve now found all of the exits from the caves I know of, plus one, and also the reset for that thing that needs to be reset. If it weren’t for the fact that there are still two movies unaccounted-for, I would think that I had found all areas of the game.
I still think there’s something I’m missing about the lumber room, but I still have no idea what it is.
Have you found all of the exits from the caves? There’s one in a village building, one that leads to the movie theater, and one that leads to the tunnels under the desert ruins, and each of them had a (relatively simple) panel puzzle that unlocks it.
There’s also a non-obvious panel in the starter area (and yes, it counts as a panel, not an environmental), and a very obvious (once it’s activated) one that’s activated by that one.
And of course, it’s also possible that there are some of those loose, lying-around puzzles that you just happened to miss. Some of those can be sneaky.
Yes.
I’m not going to 100% it. And I know one panel puzzle that I either didn’t finish or only finished because I looked it up; no point in trying to 100% the panels only.
I beat the challenge, found what I consider the real ending, and get what Jonathan Blow was trying to do. One of the audio logs really annoyed me when I first played, but I’m satisfied with my experience and don’t need to be completionist.
Did you solve the very difficult puzzle on the shipwreck?
Yeah, I know the one you mean. I can think of one more that is harder, but that one is awfully hard.
I’m curious if @Chronos got it.
The only puzzles I know of on the shipwreck are one loose-panel puzzle (very easy, like most of those), and a bunch of environmentals. Based on the monoliths, I’m pretty sure I’m missing one shipwreck environmental, but that doesn’t sound like what you’re referring to.
Is part of the challenge just finding it? Maybe you have to stop the boat underneath?
I had to use some clues to get it. I was part of the way there, but missed an important element. Fortunately, someone online posted a series of increasingly less-vague clues and I didn’t have to go through the whole list.
No, it’s easy to find and get to. Right next to a red light. On the deck below the bridge, as I recall.
…Who put those down stairs there when I wasn’t watching?
OK, there’s a lot going on, there:
- Symmetry, with the other line invisible.
- Multi-colored must-nuts
- No indication of which path is which color (but either that doesn’t matter, or if it does, you can just try it both ways
- Multi-size must-nuts, like at the end of the birdsong area.
I’m not in the right frame of mind at the moment to address that, but I’m guessing that it opens the door to another video, which would leave only one of those six unaccounted-for: I’ve found one near the starting area, that led to James Burke; one in that yellow pipe coming out of the mountainside, that led to a blond lady that I think we’re expected to recognize; and one on the desert shore, that led to Feynman; plus of course whatever the one is from the timed challenge.
I wouldn’t say it’s a spoiler to say that you get another video out of it. If the difficult and out-of-place nature wasn’t a giveaway, you can actually peer through some of the rust holes and see the crate the contains the paper.
I won’t give any actual puzzle spoilers unless you ask. Which you might, since it is friggin’ hard.