Dark Souls Bundle Junk Puzzle + Secret Dark Souls II Puzzle, complete solution.

To rid myself of these miserable bundle keys, and to commemorate the upcoming release of Dark Souls II...

A Dark Souls Deprived Class + Demon's Great Hammer Bundle Junk + Dark Souls II Puzzle! Begin here.

Giveaways have ended, congatulations to the lucky winners! Special congratulations to chour who was the only person to find the Dark Souls II giveaway. Sigh. :)

Solutions:

One problem I've had with making puzzles - I'm just not creative enough. And I don't know anything about image manipulation, or audio, or steganography, or all the more obscure things I've never even noticed were puzzles at all.

So when I make a puzzle, it's always the same. A trail of bundle junk with something good at the finish line - with everything hidden behind tedious arithmetic/hidden ascii codes/trolling/etc. So I knew if I made another giveaway, it would be made the same way as before, and solved in the same way as before, by the same people as before. :)

Now, everyone has always worked hard and definitely earned their prizes, but wouldn't it be nice to reward someone different, just this once? :) Nobody enjoys giving away a favourite game, only to see 0.0 hours played because the winner likes puzzles and never wanted the game in the first place. :)

So, when I decided to give away Dark Souls II, I wanted it to go to someone who would actually play the game. And who would play Dark Souls II? Why, people who played Dark Souls, of course! So: a series of Dark Souls trivia questions, with a final game-related logic puzzle at the end. Ideally, even if someone could google the trivia answers they would need some actual playing time to solve the real puzzle.

The first two questions were enough to chase away the laziest google users, but keep most Dark Souls fans going. Of the 54 people who reached Part C, 47 were still in the hunt at Part K. Apparently most Dark Souls players could at least find the real puzzle. :)

Part A solutions
Part B solutions
Part C solutions
Part D solutions
Part E solutions
Part F solutions
Part G solutions
Part H solutions
Part I solutions
Part J solutions

Part K i.e. the real puzzle:

In what order were the videos recorded?

For example, if you think they were recorded in the order shown, you would answer:

A B C D E F G H I J

But if you think they were recorded in the exact opposite order, you would answer:

J I H G F E D C B A

Nope, it's neither of those. Good luck!

Yes, now you need to watch the videos. Sorry! :)

Everything was done in one "NG" Deprived Class playthrough, with no friends/invaders dropping presents. The starting gift was unmentioned but hinted at in the very first puzzle. Remember the question about shortcuts? Yes, Master Key.

For non-Dark Souls players, this means I don't have any loot from a previous playthrough, or dropped by another player. The Master Key allows you to open various shortcuts in the game world, to reach areas before you could otherwise get there. Also makes the puzzle brute-force proof. :)

As you watch the videos, notice my character is wearing different armour in each one. And other than wearing the Pyromancer set in part of Blighttown, the armour seems stupidly chosen. Why go through Lower Undead Burg with no poise? Why try to ambush a Crystal Lizard with heavy, noisy armour? That's a hint. :)

And another hint from the videos: umm, two in Lower Undead Burg? Gaping Dragon? Two in Blighttown? Two in Darkroot Basin? Valley of Drakes? The Catacombs? Why not some variety? No Undead Parish, Ash Lake, Sen's Fortress, Lost Izalith? No Anor Londo? Everyone makes a video in Anor Londo!

Got it now?

For the benefit of google users: when you create a character in Dark Souls you choose a class, which determines your starting equipment. But as you progress through the game you can obtain other equipment. In fact, you can find the starting armour for all the classes as loot on various corpses in the game world - so if you like a different set, wear it! :)

So the key to the puzzle: the videos were made near the starting armour sets for each class. As you watch the videos, you can spot the white glow from a set of armour, before I've picked it up. And while I'm near that set, fighting something, running around, dying, or otherwise trying to distract you - I'm wearing a different set of armour.

Therefore: each video proves I picked up the set I'm wearing before I picked up the set on the corpse. So a video of me walking past the Knight set was made before a video of me wearing the Knight set.

Video "A" shows me wearing the Deprived set, i.e. nothing. :)

Now, a clever puzzle maker would have made only video "A" in NG+, and have the souls shown for killing things + the Stamina bar be the clue that video "A" was actually the last one recorded - but I didn't think of it until I started writing this explanation. :)

Video "B" shows me wearing the Sorcerer set, dying in Lower Undead Burg. Before I die, you see in an Undead Assassin ambush room the glow of the Thief set I haven't picked up yet. So Sorcerer comes before Thief.

Video "C" shows me wearing the Hunter set, talking to Griggs of Vinheim and dying to Torch Hollows. On the ground next to Griggs is the the Sorcerer set. So Hunter comes before Sorcerer.

Video "D" shows me wearing the Thief set, fighting Gaping Dragon, near the Warrior set. So Thief comes before Warrior.

Video "E" shows me wearing the Pyromancer set, trying to get the Wanderer set on-screen before something kills me. :) So Pyromancer comes before Wanderer.

Video "F" shows me wearing the Bandit set, barely surviving against a mighty Giant Leech. :) Off in the distance you can see the white glow from the Pyromancer set. Actually, I almost went over on autopilot to grab it before I remembered I was making a video and clumsily turned away. :) So Bandit comes before Pyromancer.

Video "G" shows me wearing the Knight set, failing to hit a Crystal Lizard before he disappears. Far below on a ledge is the glow of the Hunter set. So Knight comes before Hunter.

Video "H" shows me wearing the Wanderer set, fighting the Hydra, and practically standing on the Knight set. So Wanderer comes before Knight.

Video "I" shows me wearing the Deprived / Skeleton Man set :) - running past the Bandit set and grabbing the Red Tearstone Ring. Wait a minute - Deprived set? That's just being naked. What does that prove? Fortunately with all the other information there's only one place this video can fit. :)

Video "J" shows me wearing the Warrior Set, jumping down near the Cleric set, which I didn't wear. Sorry, ran out of bundle keys! :) So Warrior comes before Cleric.

Let's write all this down, and see if that gives us anything.

Video "A" of me fighting the Asylum demon at the start of the game is the first video.
Video "B" of me wearing the Sorcerer set must come before Video "D" of me wearing the Thief set.
Video "C" of me wearing the Hunter set must come before Video "B" of me wearing the Sorcerer set.
Video "D" of me wearing the Thief set must come before Video "J" of me wearing the Warrior set.
Video "E" of me wearing the Pyromancer set must come before Video "H" of me wearing the Wanderer set.
Video "F" of me wearing the Bandit set must come before Video "E" of me wearing the Pyromancer set.
Video "G" of me wearing the Knight set must come before Video "C" of me wearing the Hunter set.
Video "H" of me wearing the Wanderer set must come before Video "G" of me wearing the Knight set.
Video "I" of me wearing the Deprived set must come before Video "F" of me wearing the Bandit set.
Video "J" of me wearing the Warrior set must come before Video "Sorry, ran out of bundle junk" of me wearing the Cleric set. You will have to imagine me wearing it in Anor Londo, parrying Dragonslayer Arrows, ignoring the bonfire and finally beating Ornstein and Smough without taking a single scratch. Sorry, I guess Youtube deleted it for excessive awesomeness.

Rearranging these pieces (hooray! the solution!) gives "A I F E H G C B D J" - and the grand prize! Zombie Shooter 2! Woohoo! :)

Wait, another piece of bundle garbage? Where's the good stuff? This wasn't all a big troll, was it? The only visible hint is in the description for giveaway K: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? You might want to watch the videos again. :)"

Well, I may simply have been quoting Johnny Rotten, but if you ever saw this, you would have realised there was one more step. If not, you were probably doomed because there wasn't a hint for this next part anywhere. Sorry! :)

Yes, there was one more giveaway. Somehow, getting the videos in the correct order wasn't the final step. And since the prize was one of those expensive games, there were no hints. If you wanted the good stuff, you had to earn it!

I suspect victims of my KJV troll party would have guessed what was coming, but perhaps I chased them off with all the Dark Souls nonsense. :)

When I made the itstoohard.com link for the final puzzle piece, I was really hoping for all 8 characters to have ASCII between 0-99 so the humanity counter in the upper-left corner could point to it. With the endless firekeeper soul eating exploit (+5 humanity each time) plus eating humanity balls (+1 humanity each time) I think this wouldn't have required much additional work at all. I created a lot of bogus itstoohard puzzles, trying to get one that worked, but didn't get one and eventually gave up. :( :( :(

So I had to put the ASCII in the soul counter somehow.

If you haven't played Dark Souls, the number in the lower-right corner is your total "souls" - like gold and xp. You spend it to buy things, to level up, to upgrade and repair your equipment, etc.

So, plan B:

First, get a mountain of damaged equipment.
Then, check how many souls I need to show the correct ASCII code.
Then, subtract how many souls I will get from fighting my way to the starting point of the video.
Then, repair damaged things at a bonfire until I have the proper amount of souls.
Then, get to the starting point of the video without the wrong enemies dying, or otherwise screwing up the numbers.
Then, record the video.
Finally, go back and grab the armour set I was dancing around, and repeat the whole process at the next area.

And it worked, more or less. I couldn't get the exact number of souls, but thinking about it now, that would have been too obvious anyway. This was the best I could manage:

Video A: 00000 .. nothing, it's the start of the game after all. :)
Video I: 01463 .. 063 .. ?
Video F: 03790 .. 090 .. Z
Video E: 02566 .. 066 .. B
Video H: 16120 .. 120 .. x
Video G: 07121 .. 121 .. y
Video C: 05199 .. 099 .. c
Video B: 04389 .. 089 .. Y
Video D: 18584 .. 084 .. T
Video J: 06197 .. 097 .. a

Which finally leads to this.

Aha, it's Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam/Yusuf singing "Sitting" from Catch Bull at Four. Nothing to do with the puzzle, just always was a big fan of his music. :)

Plus a note "Congratulations!! Add me on Steam for the secret giveaway... :)" I'd heard some ne'er-do-wells solve puzzles together, so I did this to try and catch them. :)

Turns out this extra step wasn't necessary, since there was only one solver. The Dark Souls II giveaway was here. Nice job, chour!

Well, that's the end. Noticed any mistakes? If so, let me know. :) Otherwise, thanks for playing, everyone! :)