I poked at this for half an hour and got to… the second room? (Lecture Hall, Alphabet Room) Cryptic puzzles like this are generally NOT my thing, but I’d like to give it slightly more of a chance than this to convince me. Anyone want to give me some hints?
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What commands have you discovered so far?
abc, eye, ear, map, aha, end, win - I think those are the only things that have given a response so far.
The text in the Alphabet Room seems to imply that you can get new words by moving existing words one letter forward but I think I tried moving each letter in each of the words I already knew and no dice. Or maybe by trying words that are palindromes (“balanced”?) but none of those I could think of did anything either.
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So, what you hear in the first room is a clue to a command that you need to progress. If you didn’t ear in that room, I think the only thing to do is start over.
Yah-- start over and ear in the first room. The clue is italicized.
Ohhh. Oh, I see. OK, probably not my kind of game then. Thanks!
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Ditto the above—I don’t think the game expects you to find the command AHA before leaving the Lecture Hall.
Where I’m at in the game, I’m desperately stuck at a point where I’ve obtained an ending with two flowers, but am still prompted to do more, but I have no idea what else to try to find a new puzzle to work on. Would love some guidance there, since the game seems not to have any built-in hint system.
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I’m in the same place, though I never discovered aha and I don’t know what it does. Or win.
I just randomly happened to try typing both of those: I was exploring arbitrary three letter words - though I’ll also note that the location names are not arbitrary - they’re related to the location name and specifically they’re the fifth, fourth, and first letter, so AHA is AlpHAbet room.
(and WIN just says “If only it were that easy.”)
Aha! It makes more sense now. I only tried AHA when I was in the Alphabet Room so it did nothing.
In case it helps someone else stuck at only two flowers, I managed to find a code by brute forcing combinations: ZSZ… only found one place to use it so far. This helped me make some more progress to obtain the “second” key, which is actually my first key, I had no idea there even were keys in this game until this happened.
I’m still very stuck, but hopefully this helps someone else figure more of this out so they can tell me WTF to do so I can have closure and move on with my life for purely altruistic reasons!
EDIT: Actually, a for anyone else stuck at the same place, this is a better clue: Every Special Word you’ve found so far follows a pattern.
I found that the manipulation that gave you ZSZ can be used for every room:
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Mirror the word that took you to the room.
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Say it backwards.
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This was enough to help get me to the best ending. Thank you!! I don’t think I ever would’ve gotten there on my own 
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OK, the stubbornness kicked in and I played a bunch more. I got to what feels like AN ending (Rose, Iris, Violet) but I’ve only visited 17 rooms [Lecture Hall], Office, Alphabet Room, Chapel, Porphyrium, Dormitory, Cellar, Kitchen, Library, Store Room, Refectory, Gallery, Garden, Front Gate, Rotunda, Workshop, Menagerie and given the Raven codes it feels like there should be 26?
It wouldn’t surprise me if there are 26 rooms internally, but all these smoke-filled void places count as separate rooms as well.
Hmm, but there are only five of those, right? Bringing us to 22?
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lamp in the Alphabet room (after you light it)
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candelabra in the Refectory
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lit candle in the Porphyrium
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fireplace in the Workshop
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roaring fire in the Kitchen
I was also tracking colors and (assuming the rose is red) we’re missing orange and yellow, I think?
And there’s that closed heavy door in the cellar that feels very significant.
But also I found 28 golden animals so maybe there aren't 26 rooms.
- ant/ape/asp/ass (huh, no auk)
- bat/bee/boa (no bug)
- cat/cod/cow/cub (no cur)
- doe/dog (no dam)
- eel/elk/emu/ewe
- fox/fly
- gar/gnu
- hen
- kid (but no kit or koi)
- owl
- pig (is also hog or sow, dog is also pup, but no pug)
- ram/rat
- yak
And the game does say “You have reached the best and final ending.”
Edit: heh, and I thought of one more thing to try and the game said “(That was really the final ending.)” so OK.
I got AHA right away because I saw EYE was a palindrome and worked as a command and maybe thought the lecturer was Archimedes, even though he actually said EUREKA. So that led me down a blind alley a bit. I see now why AHA leads to the Alphabet Room, as Josh pointed out, though it’s not obvious at all if you go the wrong way. I thought there was a relationship between the A and the pyramid on the table which led me further up a blind alley.
So perhaps there needs to be a clue there!
I also tried a bunch of words and got ABC, WIN and END without much trouble.
With what I know now, I think it’s neat it’s possible to brute force with a keystroke sender, but you might miss some commands by bad luck.
I actually did see the riddle in the first room/lecture hall but I didn’t get that it was solvable right away: I think I tried RAT and it didn’t do anything so I thought I’d try to move on and figured I’d find information later that would let me make sense of it. Also I was thinking (almost complete spoiler for the first puzzle) sphinx, chimera, mythical creatures so I didn’t clue in at all that it was talking about letters in the words. I figured I’d find something later that would let me attach meanings/letters to the animals.
Apologies to those who got to the second room and then got stuck. There is supposed to be an in-game hint to help in that situation, but the logic that triggers it isn’t quite right, so it isn’t appearing sometimes.
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Thanks for the update!
And yeah, I’ve been there, man.
It was actually kind of neat being stuck for a bit. Some of the ideas I tried, well, maybe they can go into a future game of my own.
Adversity breeds innovation, and all that sort of thing!