On the one hand, the Honorary Sage ending seems pretty definitive. On the other hand, I have a few nagging doubts there’s still something to figure out:
each puzzle is conspicuously labeled with a color, green-yellow-blue-pink-purple. I thought this might just be an indication of puzzle difficulty progression, but there a lot of green and blue puzzles and only a handful of the others.
the ending mentions keywords that “no longer work” and new keywords being discovered, which makes me wonder if the player should be doing some of that discovering.
Yeah, it does what you’d expect a DiBianca game to do. And actually finding the first thread seemed pretty easy, much more so than, say, The Wand, which I would never have guessed without a pretty broad hint.
how do I access the metapuzzle? Quorbus (and the other sages) seem uninterested in hearing new keywords in any of the 60 puzzle rooms, and the game will not allow me to use non-book keywords during the fight with the Zarblot, or in the ending room afterwards.
Incidentally, it’s not clear to me
why MUNCH, PONDEROUS, and DAZZLE “used to work” but are now duds. As far as I can tell they don’t (and never did, historically) satisfy any of the conditions needed to counter a Zarblot spell?
the colors: figure out what those mean and that gives you a 61st location.
Do the additional tasks revealed and you get another ending which I found completely hilarious (though I haven’t managed to win it yet…maybe I need to start a new game and do more badly??!).
Huh. Now I’m wondering if some puzzles have multiple solutions: I only have two puzzles left (59/60) and haven’t seen any of the three words you mentioned. At least, not as keywords: I might have forgotten some of the intermediate words for some solutions.
I was wondering if anybody could give me some hints please. I have been thoroughly enjoying this game, I’ve sold all puzzles apart from 48, 54, 55 and 59 but I see, from this thread, that there is an extra aspect to the game I’m missing. I’ve grouped my words together by colour but am struggling to see a connection. Any help with solving this extra puzzle would be very greatly appreciated, thanks!
Thanks so much for that, I can’t believe I didn’t try it before! I’ve nearly finished all of the tasks in the meta puzzle, though I’m having problems figuring out the final one, the escape puzzle, any help anyone could give with that would l be very gratefully received, thanks! Also, while I’m here, I’m finding puzzle 54 quite frustrating and would love some advice please. I’ve found a word which fulfils all the conditions, but I’m told it isn’t the keyword. Now I know what the conditions are, I can’t see any other English word, other than the one I’ve already found, that would fit. Sorry for all the questions, I might be back for help with the othr three puzzles I have left, though at least two of them, 48 and 55, should be solvable by trial and error! I don’t even know where to start with 59 but I’ll leave that till last. Thanks again for all your help!
Hrm. I don’t appear to have saved my notes for 54. I can tell you that the answer I used is knight, but…hmm. What conditions did you find? Maybe that’ll jog my memory. Edit: ok, I played with it a bit and I think it’s:
Conditions for 54
happy - first letter is a-m
sad - last letter is t
embarrassed - 6 letters long
furious - first two letters are consonants?
bewildered - contains the letter i
annoyed - only one vowel
And yeah, now that I think about it, I remember finding one (or two) other matching words that weren’t the keyword? Yeah, that was frustrating.
Edit edit: doing a word search gives me blight bright flight fright knight.
48 I did by trial and error.
IIRC for 55 you can use one of the commands to cycle through the entire alphabet in an odd order, so I just generated one letter at a time, then finished by using INW to put the ‘w’ in the middle.
And I believe there was a bunch of talk and hints and maybe an outright solution to 59 in the Hint for Sage Sanctum Scramble thread.
Thanks so much for that! I had worked out the conditions but I’d just not thought of that word, many thanks for helping me there! Following your advice, I’m gradually working away at 55. I also looked at the thread you linked to about puzzle 59, but I’m struggling to follow the instructions. I use a screen-reader so I’m struggling to picture the arrangements of the glyphs effectively but will keep trying. I’m sorry to ask for yet more help after you have already been so very helpful, but do you have any hints for escaping 26 as per the meta puzzles in 61? Thanks again!
Ah. One of these years I’m going to get serious about learning to use a screenreader so I don’t have to ask dumb questions, but…for 59, can you tell where the spaces are between groups of symbols? I think that’s the only arrangement that matters.
Then it’s a substitution puzzle: each pair of symbols represents a letter, and you have to sort out which.
And…26 is the house with the mapmaster? I think you just keep walking around and trying exits that don’t exist (maybe including diagonals: northeast etc.) until he gets annoyed at you and unlocks the front door. Maybe you have to try all the possibilities in each room?