Mikalye's 21th 2016 Puzzle - An Event - Mikalye's Riddle Dungeon - Ended - Solutions Posted

I have promised this for a long time. I have published a number of puzzles (21 or 22 this year) on Steamgifts, but I have never really written an EVENT puzzle. I look with some awe at Jeffhowe's Food Pyramid, with puzzles, that lead into puzzles that lead into puzzles, and I have always wanted to try that. And so now I have. This is the most intricate set of nested puzzles that I have ever written. They are at various different levels of difficulty, and they lead to different giveaways, so everyone should be able to get some, many will get most, and a few will get through to the end.

There are more than 100 puzzles of various sizes (mostly very small) in this thing. I have tried to include and honour every form of puzzle that I could. You want a crossword puzzle, I put one in here. You want a wordsearch, I got one. You want logic puzzles, I've got two, You want a sudoku, there's even one of those in there. There are dozens of hours of work in this so I really hope that people enjoy it.

There are 14 giveaways and it all ends on 1 July at the now traditional time of 11pm GMT.

The prizes for this event are:
Hitman Collection,
Amnesia, the Dark Descent,
Middle-earth:Shadow of Mordor GotY edition,
Dungeons - The Dark Lord ,
Risen Franchise Pack,
Cities: Skylines,
The Talos Principle,
Double Dragon:Neon,
Mini Metro,
12 Labours of Hercules II: The Cretan Bull,
Skulls of the Shogun,
Thief Collection,
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 - Uprising, and
Altered Beast

That's all you need to know really. The event takes the form of a Game of sWords Level and I call it Mikalye's Riddle Dungeon

A few notes on Game of sWords rules that don't get used in most GosW levels and I should reference here. These are NOT specific to my dungeon, they are part of GosW, but most levels don't need them and so it is important to emphasise them.

Doors and Chests in GosW that ask questions can have a penalty EP if you get the answers wrong. Most Doors and Treasure Chests in my dungeon have an EP cost of 10EP. That means that if you get an answer wrong, you will lose 10EP. If you get the answer right, you will lose nothing. However, if you do not have at least 10EP, you will not be able to attempt to open the door.

GosW have the concept of clues, pieces of paper that you can pick up and store in your notebook. However, every single [expletive deleted] bit of wall in my dungeon has a clue on it. There are hundreds of them. As such your notebook can quickly be overwhelmed. A clue can exist in only one place. If you pick it up, then it disappears from the wall where you found it, and appears instead in your notebook. If you drop it from your notebook, then it will reappear at wherever you originally found it. You can highlight any clue in your notebook, hit delete and save your notebook and that clue is gone from the notebook (and back at its original wall). Sadly, you will not normally get all of the clues for a particular puzzle together, you might get puzzle 1 clue 1, then puzzle 1 clue 2, then puzzle 3 clue 4, then puzzle 1 clue 3, so learning how to manage your notebook can be useful. Alternatively, you can take your own notes on paper or electronic paper.

Finally, I use ROT13 extensively in the dungeon, and I realised after I had published the dungeon that I had not explained ROT13 in the dungeon. Most readers of this will know it, but for clarity, you simply shift each letter forward or backward 13 characters in the alphabet, so all A's become M's and vice versa, B's become N's and so on. I use ROT13 to define a clue that is not needed to solve the puzzle, but is there to provide an in-game hinting system. So if there was, for example a rebus, with a picture of a Jersey cow, then a big plus sign, then a picture of a desk lamp, then a big minus sign and then a picture of a boy scout camp with tents around a bonfire, you could solve as COW+LAMP-CAMP = OWL (Note, there is only one rebus in the dungeon and it is easier than this one). You could probably do that without any hint, but I could include a ROT13 enciphered hint to say something like "the third picture is of a CAMP" (Gur guveq cvpgher vf bs n PNZC) or even "you are looking for a three-letter type of bird" (lbh ner ybbxvat sbe n guerr-yrggre glcr bs oveq). I would advise against deciphering the ROT13 clues unless you are stuck on that particular thing, but it is of course your dungeon to play with.

Do note, that I do get to see how many treasures people have encountered and where. If you enter a givewaway for a treasure you cannot possibly have reached yet, then I will be cross and call for a re-roll. Please do not cheat.

Lastly, I had a new year's resolution to publish a minimum of 52 puzzles this year, and I am still on target, but not if I do not publish for the month that this is running, so I will also publish puzzles to pretty much the normal schedule while this is live. Seeing Nordhbane running PA7 and PA8 simultaneously told me that this could work.

Enjoy,
Mikalye