So I’ve got what I think is about halfway through the game (?) and I’m stuck. I’ve found Heracles, but the game seems to imply I need to solve all of the other puzzles first before I can make progress there.
The two things I think I should be working on:
In the Heroon of Kadmos, I can’t figure out what parts of the puzzle I can interact with. “Large scale” is understood as the small scale so I don’t know if the large scale really exists (or if it’s just another AI-hallucinated detail in the text). The description mentions that the scale has six pans but “pans” isn’t understood and I can’t seem to put anything on the scale itself.
In the Prytaneion, I’ve decoded the text on the scroll and lit the corresponding torches but nothing seemed to happen. I’ve also found the trapdoor but can’t open it. I assume whatever I need to do involves the message on the wax tablet but I can’t make sense of that.
From reading other reviews and my own experience playing:
Heroon of Kadmos:
The small scale has a “left pan” and “right pan” to test two objects against each other for relative weight. The other scale has “pan 1,” “pan 2,” … “pan 6” where you can put things once you have determined their relative weights.
Note that putting things on the pan 1 etc. has softlocked some people, so try to only put things on them that you are sure go there. May the odds be in your favor.
Not sure what to put on the scales yet? Possible solution: there are apparently six weights that you can discover in this room if you put a rock on the shelf-like top of the dragon statue?
Prytaneion:
There are codes corresponding to each half of the torches.
Wax tablet: This is a cryptogram. I just used an online solver because I didn’t feel like wasting much of my 2 hours on it. The decoded clue will tell you what to do with it. Still not sure? Solution: “put tablet in fire”
Parchment: This, too, is a cryptogram. I just used an online solver because I didn’t feel like wasting much of my 2 hours on it.
For the Heroon: yeah, there are disambiguation issues that make this way tougher than it should be. There is a large scale, but you can’t interact with it directly - you can put things in the left and right pans directly though, by using LEFT and RIGHT. Similarly, the pans on the small scale can be interacted with using FIRST, SECOND, etc. But actually it sounds like you’re not ready to use any of those yet - there are a couple initial steps you need to accomplish before the scale is useful. More direct hints in the next paragraphs:
There should be a small rock you’ve found in this place - you can put it somewhere on the statue.
Put the rock on top the statue - yeah, I dunno - and you’ll get a bunch of dragon teeth. You should see some things here indicating what you might want to do with them.
Put all six teeth into the plate on the altar and you’ll get some weights; now the stuff in the first paragraph above should be helpful!
As for Athens: yup, you need to decode the writing on the tablet, which is a cryptogram. There are a lot of online solvers to help with these, which makes the puzzle much more manageable - I used this one.
Thanks both. I’m slightly annoyed with myself for not persevering with the cryptogram - I think the fact that the other part of the puzzle was a relatively obvious Caesar cipher made me expect that there should have been a similarly simple solution for that one. On the other hand, given that PUT ROCK ON STATUE (rather than PUT ROCK ON HEAD) gives a default failure response, I think the odds of me solving the other puzzle without hints were slim.