As I sadly predicted, the riddles went along pretty fast and the puzzle right after caused progress to again come to a halt.
Data General Eclipse circa 1979, via science70.
So to not leave you in suspense from last time:
The inscription appears to be a mixture of ancient and modern English:
Round (3nm + 3f + 4c + 2y) m
I had previously sussed out “y” might be “yards” and “nm” might be “nautical miles” and that this was a simple length calculation (where you round the number to the closest integer at the end) but I was having trouble with “f” and “c”, which turned out to be “furlongs” and “chains” specifically.
From the Campus Martius Museum.
This comes out to be 6242 meters, so the password is “6242”.
-> say 6242
‘6242’
There is a tremendous rumbling under the floor beneath you as some great and ancient force comes to life. The whole room begins to shake showering you in sand and dust. Just as the rumbling begins to subside, the whole of the east wall starts to descend gradually, and the rumbling continues afresh. The wall slowly slips down until it comes to rest with a jolt, its top now level with the surrounding floor. The sand and dust are blown out of the room by a slight draught. It is now quiet.
-> e
Blue Room
You are in a room where the walls, floor and ceiling have been carved from beautiful blue rock.
Exits: —W ——– —
There is a strange inscription on the east wall.
There is a platinum sphere here
The next riddle asks to convert
101010010010001000101 100000 100111010101011001101100001010001011010010
100000 10011111000110 100000 101010010010001000101 100000
10000101000101100000110100111010100
from binary to text (“THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST”), followed by another riddle that asks you to convert
54 48 45 4E 41 4D 45 4F 46 54 48 45 47 41 4D 45
from hexadecimal to text (“FERRET”). The next riddle was a little less of a breeze:
This inscription appears to be a bit of a period piece and looks like this:
5 8 86
7
15 64
I did manage to realize “period piece” was referring to the periodic table, and the 5 and 86 are referring to Boron (Bo) and Radon (Rn) respectively and their positions on the table, and 7 probably meant Nitrogen (N). But the 15 and 64 don’t lead to anything sensible; the trick here is to not convert the last portion, so the whole text reads as “BORN N 1564”, which leads to the answer SHAKESPEARE.
‘shakespeare’
There is a tremendous rumbling under the floor beneath you as some great and ancient force comes to life. The whole room begins to shake showering you in sand and dust. Just as the rumbling begins to subside, the whole of the east wall starts to descend gradually, and the rumbling continues afresh. The wall slowly slips down until it comes to rest with a jolt, its top now level with the surrounding floor. The sand and dust are blown out of the room by a slight draught. It is now quiet.
-> e
White Room
You are in a room where the walls, floor and ceiling have been carved from beautiful white rock.
Exits: —W ——– —
There is a brown pin here
At last, the final pin! To recap, I’d been finding colored pins since phase 2, and there was a suggestive card that indicated there would be four of them:
The pieces of this card are also spread out over two phases.
With items picked up along the way, my inventory was now:
an orange pin
a white pin
a black pin
a brown pin
a length of steel wire
a curved wooden splint
a steel bolt
a plastic sheet
a titanium orb
a ferrite ball
a platinum sphere
Getting to the white room (which has no inscription and no new exits) required reaching a red room, orange room, grey room, tangerine room, blue room, indigo room, and violet room in order. The blue room has a “platinum sphere”, the indigo room has a “ferrite ball”, and the violet room has a “titanium orb”.
This is highly suggestive that the colored pins need to be dropped in the right rainbow rooms (and maybe the metal balls too?) which will cause something to unlock.
Trivial, right? The “gap” in the rainbow seems to be grey, so brown goes there. Maybe opposite of black is white? Where does white and orange go then? That’s only two pins to test, surely it won’t be too hard to test all the possibilities and finish this off and —
— well, no, that didn’t work. Nor did any other combination I tried. The “hint” feature (which previously never worked, and now magically gives hints once the riddles start) just says
Go down on it.
which I’ve only been able to parse as “go down in frequency on the visible spectrum”, that is, from red down to violet. I’m still quite close to just ramming every single possibility into a Python script and letting it do the work.
The big issue here, game-design wise, is similar to one with the desert. With the desert, you have to comb many, many, empty rooms, enough to make most players question if they’re taking the right approach, only to find an important location in a random direction. Here, despite my guesswork “feeling” right, it’s unclear if I’m even heading in the right direction. This is quite similar to my complaints about second-order puzzles, where two “reasonable” puzzle manipulations become much harder to work out when they are required in combination without intermediate feedback.
My next post is going to be another one-shot, but don’t worry, I’m stubbornly hanging on Ferret for now, even if the next portion of the game only falls via brute force.
Renga in Blue 
