"Within the Woods" Invisiclues Hints / Walkthrough / Map

Playing Game Hints
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General advice

  • These are hints for Within the Woods by BrownPants. I wrote them using Release 2 / Serial number 260122.
  • This is a game where you need to examine everything, even things that might not be obvious to examine. If you don’t happen to examine all of the stuff you need, you won’t be able to make any progress until you examine the right stuff. (There’s an “Examining Things” section whre I’ll tell you what you need to examine in what locations.)
  • You even need to SEARCH some things, and for at least one puzzle, you’ll guess the verb.

Map (mild spoilers)

This map lists all of the things you need to examine/search. Since you need to examine everything, it’s not very spoilerific. Click the blurred map to reveal it, then click it again to download it.

within-the-woods-map

Part 1: Repairing the Cabin

It’s dark! How do I get around?

  1. EXAMINE THE DOOR in the starting room, “Front of the Cabin”.

  2. GET THE LANTERN. TURN IT ON. Now you can travel to other rooms.

What do I need to do?

  1. First, make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See the “Examining Things” section below.)

  2. EXAMINE THE NOTEBOOK.

  3. If it says “Check around for damage”, you haven’t examined everything.

  4. If you’ve examined everything, it will tell you to deal with the glass on the porch, the bedroom (the Small Bedroom), and the dining room, to repair windows in the living room, small bedroom, and dining room, to clean up the mess in the living room, to fix the bathtub pipe, and to repair and hang the cabin door. (See hints below for each of those tasks.)

  5. When you’ve completed all of the repairs, it’s time to head home. Return to the Front of the Cabin.

  6. Return to the Living Room to begin Part 2. (See “Part 2” below.)

Examining Things

This is a game where you need to examine everything, even things that might not be obvious to examine. If you don’t happen to examine all of the stuff you need, you won’t be able to make any progress until you examine the right stuff.

So, here’s a list of all the stuff you need to examine, without yet needing to solve any puzzles.

Front of the Cabin

  • door → lantern

Porch

  • window

  • glass

Living Room

  • mess

  • fireplace

  • vase → nails

  • clock

  • mirror

  • window

  • trapdoor

Cellar

  • window → axe handle

  • pipes

  • stairs

Dining Area

  • shelf → rag

  • window

  • glass

Small Bedroom

  • shelf

  • mug → key ring

  • books → diary

  • window

  • glass

  • curtain

Bathroom

  • broom

  • bathtub

Back Hallway

  • floorboards

Rear Woods

  • planks

Barn

  • stump → axe head

Eastern Woods

  • chimney

  • moss

Southwest Woods

  • soil

You’ll even need to SEARCH some things.

Large Bedroom

  • search bed → duct tape

Living Room

  • search couch → etching

Completing notebook tasks

How do I take care of the glass?

  1. First, make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See the section above.)

  2. You have a broom.

  3. CLEAN THE GLASS WITH THE BROOM.

How do I clean up the mess in the living room?

  1. First, make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See the section above.)

  2. You have a broom.

  3. CLEAN THE MESS WITH THE BROOM.

How do I repair the broken pipe?

  1. First, make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See the section above.)

  2. You’ll also need to search some stuff, see above.

  3. You should have the lantern, nails, rag, axe head, axe handle, key ring, diary, broom, and duct tape.

  4. Once you have the rag and the duct tape, you can REPAIR THE PIPE WITH THE DUCT TAPE.

How do I repair the windows?

  1. You can’t repair any windows until you’ve repaired the broken pipe. See above.

  2. First, make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See the section above.)

  3. You should have the lantern, nails, axe head, axe handle, key ring, diary, broom, and, once you’ve fixed the pipe, you should have the hammer (in the Cellar).

  4. With a hammer and nails, you nearly have a complete set of repair tools. You just need wood.

  5. There are wooden planks in Rear Woods.

  6. The wooden planks are too long.

  7. You need to shorten them.

  8. CHOP PLANKS WITH AXE HEAD.

  9. REPAIR AXE HEAD WITH HANDLE. CHOP WOOD WITH AXE.

  10. There’s a suitable place for chopping wood outdoors.

  11. It’s at the Barn.

  12. PUT THE PLANKS ON THE STUMP. CHOP WOOD WITH AXE. GET THE WOOD.

  13. Now you have a complete set of repair tools; you can go to any broken window and REPAIR THE BROKEN WINDOW WITH THE HAMMER.

How do I repair the door?

  1. First, figure out how to repair a window, and make sure you’ve examined everything in every room. (See above.)

  2. You should have the lantern, a “complete set of repair tools” (hammer, nails, cut wood), axe, key ring, diary, and broom.

  3. If you have a “complete set of repair tools” (hammer, nails, cut wood), try REPAIR THE DOOR WITH THE HAMMER.

  4. A suitable place to set the door is behind a locked door.

  5. You’ve found three locked doors so far.

  6. You’ve found the cellar door, the workshed door, and the barn door.

  7. You’ll fix the door in the workshed.

  8. In Western Woods, UNLOCK THE DOOR WITH THE KEY.

  9. PUT THE DOOR ON THE WORKBENCH. REPAIR THE BROKEN DOOR WITH THE HAMMER. GET DOOR.

  10. Return to the Porch and HANG THE DOOR ON THE HINGES.

How do I repair the shovel?

  1. First, figure out how to repair a window. (See above.)

  2. Once you have a “complete set of repair tools” (hammer, nails, cut wood) you can REPAIR THE SHOVEL WITH THE HAMMER.

Part 2: Defeating the Demon

How do I get away from the demon?

  1. The easiest way is to shoot it with the shotgun you found in the living room. (See “How do I operate the shotgun?” below.)

  2. There’s another way, if you got everything from the Workshop.

  3. Did you examine the workbench?

  4. Get the padlock and chain from the workshop. You can use them to lock up the demon for a while.

  5. Have you seen something you could lock?

  6. When the demon is with you in the living room, you can GO DOWN to the Cellar and the demon will follow you.

  7. If you then GO UP back to the Living Room, the demon will pause before following you.

  8. CLOSE THE TRAPDOOR. LOCK THE TRAPDOOR WITH THE PADLOCK. But, you will eventually need to go back into the Cellar to defeat the demon.

  9. You already have the key to the padlock.

  10. UNLOCK THE PADLOCK WITH THE KEY RING.

How do I operate the shotgun?

  1. The shotgun takes four turns to load, and there are a limited number of shells. If you try to load it in front of the demon, the demon will kill you before you can finish. (You may find it easier to undo/restore back to before you finished your chores, to prepare to face the demon.)

  2. To start, OPEN THE SHOTGUN.

  3. If it contains an empty shell, GET THE EMPTY SHELL.

  4. LOAD THE SHOTGUN WITH A SHELL. CLOSE THE SHOTGUN.

  5. Then, when facing the demon, SHOOT THE DEMON WITH THE SHOTGUN. (Then reload!)

How do I defeat the demon?

  1. Start by shooting the demon with the shotgun you found in the living room. (See “How do I operate the shotgun?” above.)

  2. When you shoot the demon, it drops an old key.

  3. In the Cellar, UNLOCK THE DOOR WITH THE OLD KEY.

  4. In the Cellar Back Room, EXAMINE THE DESK. EXAMINE THE JOURNAL.

  5. To defeat the demon, you have to find the “Words of Sleep”, the reliquary, the bone, and the dagger. You’ll need to taint the dagger, and perform the ritual. See below.

Where are the “Words of Sleep”?

  1. You’ll have to SEARCH something to find it.

  2. It’s downstairs.

  3. It’s in the Cellar Back Room.

  4. SEARCH THE POSTER. EXAMINE THE ALCOVE. EXAMINE THE PAGE.

Where’s the bone for the ritual?

  1. It’s in the Barn. You’ll have to guess the combination. (Type INPUT #### to guess the combination.)

  2. Clues for the combination are in the diary and the journal.

  3. It’s a date.

  4. INPUT 1021. OPEN THE TRUNK. EXAMINE THE BONES. GET THE BONE.

Where’s the reliquary?

  1. READ THE DIARY. Make sure you’ve examined everything. (See “Examining Things” above.)

  2. It’s under the floorboards in the Back Hallway.

  3. PRY THE FLOORBOARD WITH THE HAMMER. GET THE BOX.

How do I open the reliquary?

  1. First, find the bone for the ritual. (See above.)

  2. Make sure you’ve examined everything. (See “Examining Things” above.)

  3. You’ll need to deduce the combination, then push on the sigils to open it.

  4. There are four etchings in the game. If you’ve examined everything, you’ve found the etching on the Cellar stairs and under the Living Room couch, and the etching in the trunk in the Barn. Something you examined hasn’t been of use yet.

  5. SEARCH THE MOSS in the Eastern Woods.

  6. SCRAPE THE MOSS WITH THE HAMMER.

  7. The etchings contain numbers that convey the combination.

  8. The couch etching contains a tree with three branches.

  9. The stairs etching contains a moon with four craters.

  10. The trunk etching contains one eye.

  11. The moss etching contains a skull with two eyes.

  12. PUSH THE FIRST SIGIL until it shows a “bleeding eyeball.”

  13. PUSH THE SECOND SIGIL until it shows a “demonic skull.” (It starts off like that.)

  14. PUSH THE THIRD SIGIL until it shows a “gnarled tree.”

  15. PUSH THE FOURTH SIGIL until it shows a “full moon.”

Where is the dagger?

  1. It’s in the reliquary. See above.

How do I taint the dagger?

  1. Make sure you’ve examined everything. (See “Examining Things” above.)

  2. You’ll need to find remains.

  3. The remains are in the soil in the Southwest Woods.

  4. DIG IN THE SOIL. You’ll need something to dig with.

  5. DIG IN THE SOIL WITH THE SHOVEL.

  6. You’ll need to repair the shovel.

  7. REPAIR THE SHOVEL WITH THE HAMMER. DIG IN THE SOIL WITH THE SHOVEL. EXAMINE THE GRAVE. EXAMINE THE SHEET.

  8. The next step requires guessing the verb.

  9. SMEAR THE DAGGER WITH THE SHEET.

Where were the awakening words spoken?

  1. READ THE DIARY from the Small Bedroom.

  2. Note the 10/17 entry.

  3. “I could hear Raymond in his study below speaking his translations aloud”

  4. They were spoken in the Cellar Back Room.

How do I perform the ritual?

  1. READ THE JOURNAL carefully.

  2. You’ll need to find the reliquary, the “Words of Sleep”, the bone, and the dagger. You’ll also need to taint the dagger, and figure out where the awakening words were spoken. See above. (Don’t reveal the next clue until you have all of these tasks finished.)

  3. You know where the awakening words were spoken, so dig a hole there.

  4. DIG A HOLE WITH THE SHOVEL in the Cellar Back Room.

  5. PUT THE BOX IN THE HOLE. SAY KANDA VESH THUL KANDA NU TAL SABOTH TANTIR KANDA.

  6. If nothing seems to happen: you might not have put the bone and the dagger in the box, or the dagger might not be tainted. (When you examine the dagger, it should say “The blade is tainted with the ectoplasmic remains of a demon.”) But, more likely, you didn’t perform the ritual at the correct time.

  7. READ THE DIARY.

  8. Note what it said about the clock.

  9. “The clock in the living room began to chime ceaselessly, despite it being still three minutes til the hour…” “A deep unease grows in my stomach whenever I move the hour and minute hands…”

  10. EXAMINE THE CLOCK. You can PUSH HOUR HAND TO # and PUSH MINUTE HAND TO #.

  11. EXAMINE THE MIRROR.

  12. The mirror is showing a different time from the clock.

  13. PUSH THE MINUTE HAND TO 57. PUSH THE HOUR HAND TO 6.

  14. Now, when you PUT THE BOX IN THE HOLE. SAY KANDA VESH THUL KANDA NU TAL SABOTH TANTIR KANDA, the game should end in victory. (If it doesn’t, you need to make sure the clock is set to 6:57, the bone and the tainted dagger are in the box, and the box is closed and in the hole.)

Have you tried…

  • … sitting on the swing on the Porch?
  • … opening the closet in the Small Bedroom?
  • … wearing the brown pants?
  • … locking the demon in the Cellar? (See “How do I get away from the demon?” above.)
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Excellent work with these. It’s always wonderful to see a quality set of Invisiclues; no disrespect to the usual walkthrough format, but I think the hint booklet is a bit of IF heritage that should be celebrated.

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BTW, I don’t know how to get all 24 points out of 24. Any ideas?

I think it may involve locking the demon in the Cellar using the padlock and chain (which earns me a point), but I can’t imagine how you’d win at that point, because you can’t get back into the Cellar Back Room.

I read through the gblorb using glulx-strings and I’m still at a loss.

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Hey, thank you for putting this up (and playing the game!) I’m going to make some changes in the next version based on the stuff you said. This is my first ever game and I’m still learning.

I can add a spoiler covered list of getting points if you like?

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A spoiler point list would be great!

My main feedback for a “quick fix” would be to add an in-game HINT that would nudge people to examine/take everything they haven’t found yet. (“There’s something important that you haven’t examined yet in the Living Room.”)

Speaking personally, I don’t really like SEARCH mechanics unless they are very clearly hinted in the EXAMINE description, because otherwise I’m forced to SEARCH everything just in case it’s searchable, and that’s very rarely fun.

For the couch and the bed in the Large Bedroom, I’d explicitly say “You can see something underneath the couch/bed” in the EXAMINE description. I think the moss does this OK, “Some of it looks like it may have been recently disturbed,” but it could be even clearer IMO.

I’d go as far as to say that the poster doesn’t sound interesting to search in its description today:

Hanging askew on the wall, most of the poster has been torn away, leaving only the remains of an upper quadrant. From the barely legible text on this section, and the peculiar shape of a man’s skull, you recognize it as the poster for the movie “The Hills Have Eyes”.

I read that and thought that it was just a tiny scrap glued to the wall, not something worth SEARCHing.

Oh, and, I think the parser could use some help around the grave. Currently you have to guess the verb smear, as in smear the dagger with the sheet. You can’t touch the sheet/remains with the dagger, or touch the dagger with the sheet/remains. You can’t put the dagger on the sheet, or vice versa. You can’t stab/cut the sheet/remains with the dagger. I think all of these examples should have worked.

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Hi, thank you so much for taking the time to provide feedback!

I think its a great idea to add an in-game hint to nudge the player, I’ll start learning how to code that.

Regarding the SEARCH stuff, I was debating this myself since there is very few places to use it, I’ll rewrite some descriptions to hint toward searching or maybe just remove search altogether, to be honest.

For the parser stuff around the grave, I’ll add the verbs suggested. On release 2 I have TAINT / DIP / SMEAR dagger IN / WITH, I figured since the journal says to taint the dagger it might be the main verb the player tries, but I’ll have to add way more verbs for this.

In the review you mentioned the floorboard in the front hallway, sorry about that, originally it was in that room and I decided to move it to the back hallway and totally overlooked removing all mentions of it from the room description.

On locking up the demon in the cellar, that’s to keep it off your back while exploring but the tradeoff is eventually you’ll have to release it to go back down there. You can also lock it up in a couple other places for different results.

Once again, thanks for the feedback! This game was basically just a short test game I built while trying to learn how to code along the way, and I tried to make it as complete as possible while also getting my brain around the code side of things.

The following is a list of when points are awarded, in a generally first to last order the player might encounter them:

Sit on the bench swing

Wear the brown pants

Repair broken pipe

Repair the axe

Cut the wood

Sweep up mess in living room

Sweep up glass (x3)

Scrape the moss

Repair broken window (x3)

Repair door

Hang repaired door

Repair broken shovel

Dig up mound

Lock up trapdoor

Shoot the demon

Lift the floorboard

Solve the reliquary puzzle

Taint the dagger

Solve the barn lock puzzle

Recite the ritual (Completing the game with ending 10)

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I don’t think this one’s working properly.

It seems like maybe it fails to give you a point if you try to wear the pants before getting them? After that message, getting them and wearing them doesn’t score you a point.

> open closet
You tug gently on the partition curtain and the closet door swings open. There are several more flannel shirts, a few pairs of brown pants, and other miscellaneous clothes left inside. You push the closet closed again.

> wear brown pants
(You must be holding the brown pants before doing that.)

> get brown pants
Taken.

> wear brown pants
You put on the brown pants.

> x brown pants
The pants are brown.

Wearing them grants you great comfort, and you find your mind drifting from the task at hand to certain subjects more deserving of your attention, such as pondering if a bear standing on its hind legs could be mistaken for Bigfoot, then perhaps Bigfoot might move discreetly through the Pacific Northwest woods on all fours and thus be mistaken for a bear. How many bear sightings have actually been Bigfoot? And how many “bear maulings” have actually been perpetrated by Bigfoot?

The wind howls as you think on these things… which reminds you of a buzzing mosquito. If one were to squeeze a feeding mosquito, would that inject the drawn blood back into one’s body? If so, might the blood drawn from other animals then also enter one’s body? Could that be the catalyst for granting some unknown superpower? What if the mosquito had previously fed on a Bigfoot? One would then perhaps have the potential to become a werebigfoot…

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Oh, yup that’s exactly the bug! Seems like trying to wear them before getting them counts as “after wearing for the first time award a point” which is how I coded it. I should have realized that the “first time” part would be marked as already done even if the action itself fails. I’ll see about figuring out the best way to fix it.

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I’ve run into that issue a lot before, actually, having ‘first time’ run even for failed attempts. I’ve never found an elegant solution, but I usually do something like have a variable called ‘pantsworn’ that starts out false and then do a rule like 'every turn: if the pants are worn: now pantsworn is true)

(I’m only posting this here because posting bad code on the forums is usually a way to attract people to correct you and correct good code)

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