IRL Cakeday was coming!

So, there is a train of game giveaways - nothing special, but I'd consider these games worth having in my library.
Level restriction is 1+

Every giveaway is acessible through a simple puzzle.
I tried making puzzles simple, but not trivial.
Every puzzle is related to the game it leads to.
If there will be people stuck at some puzzle I'd provide more hints or a shortcut to the next car, so that the next puzzle can be attempted.
Ranting, pleading for hints and other feedback is highly welcome

Update 1.99

It looks like almost everyone is stuck on the second puzzle, therefore I'll provide a couple of hints for that one today. The first one will be just a small one, but the second is going to be more precise. Also a shortcut to the third puzzle will be given in the second giveaway at the time second hint is provided (the puzzle difficulty is sort of random, so the 3rd might be easier, than the 2nd... may be not...).

Hint 1 (puzzle 2)

The giveaway behind the puzzle is actually not for a single game, but for a 2-game set.

Hint 2 (puzzle 2)

Of the three actions the puzzle want you to perform on a particular input one is purely arithmetical, the other two are rather string/array manipulations althought one of them can also be described as a set of mathematical operations of the input is slightly pre-processed.
(Also giveaway 2 now has a shortcut to puzzle 3.)

Hint 3 (puzzles 2, 3, 5)

There are not only the hints I've left, there also hints I didn't care to hide.

Update 2.3

Seems like it's time to add more hints. Expect them to be coming soon. Already updated hint 3.
Have you been attentive to accompanying information and looked for hints to puzzles 3 and 4 that were initially there?
List of puzzle titles and corresponding numbers now available.
And there is a first person to reach the last puzzle.

Hint 4 (puzzle 5)

Q1 and Q2 represent the same type of in-game lore, Q3 - another one and Q4 - another one. First 3 questions can be found on the wikipedia entry for the game. Q4 has a separate wikipedia page, which mentions the game (as the term used there is very specific for this particular game).

Hint 5 (puzzle 5, Q4, vague hint)

Batman!

Update 3.0

Time for more hints, I guess. This time I'll summarize thing that were given as comments in this thread, as some of the comments had mistakes in them and were accidentally misleading.
Plus added some more hints (may me obvious).

Hint 6 (all puzzles)

Only the last puzzle has a game name (non-bundle stuff) as an answer. Others can use parts of the game names or don't use game names at all.

Hint 7 (puzzle 4)

Questions in puzzle 4 have numerous possible answers. Taking the symmetry into account leads to a pretty simple bruteforcing procedure if you don't know what the puzzle is actually about.

Hint 8 (puzzle 3)

No dots necessary (although acceptable).

Update 4.0

There is less than 24 hours left before the giveaways end. A shortcut to the fifth puzzle is now open at the second giveaway.

Update 5.5

Last minute feedback leads to last minute hints.
And there is a first person to solve all of them!
As it was pointed out images search on puzzle 3 provides no meaningful results under some conditions (checked that myself from a different location), therefore, a hint/lead is provided.

Hint 9 (puzzle 5)

Q1 and Q2 can be summarized as a mathematical concept. Although you don't need to put this anywhere in the answers.

Hint 10 (puzzle 3)

"Black mixture of hydrocarbons and free carbon", "cave" (synonym, sounds similar, but not exactly), thing above you (when you are outside).

Hint 11 (puzzle 5)

1.7

Final Update

Thanks to everyone participating in the puzzle train. The giveaways have ended, the keys have been sent.
One game is left unclaimed and it goes public.
See below for puzzle answers and hints explanation.

Puzzle list

  1. Crossing the river of eternal void
  2. The order, the moment
  3. What's that thing glowing?
  4. It is alive!
  5. Obliterate!
  6. What's there in the distance?

Answers

Puzzle 1
Puzzle 2
Puzzle 3
Puzzle 4
Puzzle 5
Puzzle 6

Solutions

  1. The questions are the "Game Over" messages in "The Bridge". Googling for the first one usually results in nothing particular. Googling the second one or several of them is likely to get you here, where you can find all of them.

  2. Please share how you got stuck with this one, so future puzzles can be improved. The way to solve the puzzle is to take the numbers in my nickname ("your host" was myself), split them in two parts (13 and 9), swap the order ("left to righ and right to left", thus 9 and 13) and do what the questions tell you to do (subtract 2 from each number). This gives you the numbers in the game names in the bundle 7 and 11.

  3. Google search for the image usually (but not always) provides a short video about Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker is one of his most famous movies. Additionally hint 10 says "Tar"-"cove"-"sky" and the imgur image description mentions three characters from the movie (the writer, the professor and monkey).

  4. The figures are dynamic figures of the Game of life. Adding one additional cell (depending on position) either makes the configuration evolve into a static figure (Q1) or four figures identical to the initial one (Q2). Imgur desctiption has additional lead to the Gmae of life.

  5. The answers are Total Annihilation (first game of the series, that led to Planetary Annihilation, AFAIK) in-game lore. Q1 and Q2 are the two in-game fractions. Q3 is the field leader of the troops, the Commander. Q4 is Nanolathe, the cool way of construction used in the game. Last-minute hint "1.7" is the in-game time of Planetary Annihilation in my Steam profile (didn't have mech time to come up with something more relevant).

  6. The puzzle just point to the wikipedia description of the parallax effect. (googling alteration effect movement distance usually gets you tere in no time).

Also, note, that titles and descriptions in the puzzle are always highly related to the game and thus the answer.

No action here anymore!!!

Mood music

View attached image.
View attached image.
View attached image.
9 years ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for mini-update.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for stuck on P2 and P3 xD

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I'm really hoping you can get behind P2.
(sort of a hint)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for updated hints.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Damn you m139! Your update made my message dissapear! T_T
I got puzzle 4.
Progress: 1,3,4 solved.
(emmh and I think I'm confusing now... you really should put numbers in the puzzles to know what number they are.... because what you call puzzle 3 I think I call it puzzle 4)
n-EDIT: or maybe not.. stuck on 5 (I have an initial idea for 2 but I'm doing something wrong yet)
n+1-EDIT: Ok I made a list with all the puzzles. I should have done this at first. Now I know which is the puzzle 1, 2, 3.. :D

9 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sorry for that (what a time to make an update!).

I hope I didn't confuse myself with all the disorder and multi-track drifting (looks OK at the moment).
My counting order is: puzzle 1 for giveaway 2, puzzle 2 for giveaway 3 (the one everyone is stuck on), puzzle 3 for giveaway 4 (guess the movie thing) and so on.

This is weird. According to hint 4 Q2 should be easy if you have Q1.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

No, no, didn't get q1 from puzzle 5 yet. "Progress: 1,3,4 solvedI" refers to the puzzles I have solved so far.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Ah, so you had an initial idea for Puzzle 2? Check the comments in this thread, there are a few ones I've left that I consider "sort of hints". Might be of some use.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for tiny update.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for P5 solved!

9 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Updated the discussion header.
Probably P5

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

haha yes P5, my bad! fixed!

Unfortunately couldn't guess P6 right away...

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Shouldn't be hard.
Oh! My bad!
If you've been looking for "unofficial hints" one of them turns out to be wrong (fixed).

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

..wait.. there are unofficial hints?! O.o

EDIT: Oh I see what you mean :-)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for more hints.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

MEGAbump for solving P2. But I can't get pass through P3... Shame on me, usually I'm really good with movies.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I wonder what the image search shows you (there were only a few results for me, which were valid leads to the solution), but it was found out recently, that image search results actually differ from person to person (or it might have been the ordering of search results, which will not matter in this case, as the number of results was really small).

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Inage search is not helping at all, I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but I only get some Game of Thrones images.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Maybe try to do it in different search engine

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Tried it out now, actually got only Game of throne images.
Tried tineye - no result.
Have a hint therefore.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for final shortcut.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sorry it made you feel that way.
Actually, which puzzle are you speaking of? If you have solved the first one (it has quite a large number of solvers) then you should have access to 3 more (number 2, 3 and 5).

Could you share your guesses, when the GAs are over and I'll post the answers? I really want to know, what made the puzzles so confusing so that I can avoid that in future ones or actually put those things there, depending on how evil I feel.

Thank you. Good luck with the other puzzles if you don't feel too good about these ones.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Lol Thanks for the kind words but m139 doesn't need my permission or advice to make his puzzles. And as you said, other people have solved puzzles 2 (1 out of 17 people solved it) and 5 (1 out of 5 people solved it), all of them known puzzlers, so it is not impossible. I'm still trying it myself. Most puzzle creators give great hints when they see their giveaways won't reach 5 entries so they can get the CV. m139's previous puzzle giveaways ended with 2 and 0 (weee I solved this one!) entries, so you can guess that he doesn't care it too much.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Ah, I remember those :)
I was a bit surprised I didn't get CV for the 2-entry one at that time, but then I found the reason out. But for this train I'm kind of "meh, whatever" about the CV.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Oh, haven't noticed that comment at first.
That's actually a good point (about the disinterst in CV being caught by players - should give it a second thought next time).
My interest is actually in the puzzles being solved, so I'm trying to find the balance between them being interesting (i.e. not obvious, presenting questions in unfamiliar ways), but not too hard (like, not giving distractions, providing multiple spelling possibilities, trying to be sort of cryptic, but precise in instructions). I'm sort of hoping that doesn't cause frustration only and actually attracts people.
But that balance is far from being found yet.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Well, I;m trying to give some guides to the puzzles, but I'm not going to make them obvious. This is especially true, when there are solvers for the puzzle already - not that I think that "if the puzzle has whatever solvers, it can be solved by anyone", no, but I think it's rather unfair to the first "hard" solvers to provide obvious hints and diminish their chances to win (I feel sort of bad, when I win a game after many-many hints and the people who got there well before me get nothing)...

But this is not the actual reason for vague and sort of "random" hints. Scroll through the comments section. How many comments can you find, that say "Oh shit, I'm stuck with Q4 of P5" or "I definitely know, what are the actions you speak of in P2, but I'm confused with the order" - these are almost none, which means I actually don't know what exactly to give hints on. How am I supposed to help people if I don't know, what the are stuck with?!
I didn't ask for the feedback out of blue, you know.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 1 year ago.

9 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Still, it's good to have some feedback on actual puzzle questions. Lets one learn to make good (not "easy" ones, no) puzzles. There is pretty much always feedback from the solvers inside the GA, but I hope there'd be some from those who did attempt, but didn't make it through.
Although, now I see a few flaws in the puzzles (see update 5.5 about the image search, also I just realized, that puzzle 5 can hardly be solved unless you guess the game behind it and I haven't actually given any additional hints about that, which isn't really helpful and so on).

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

You still have time to give some hints about the game of P5 :P

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

This ^^ feedback would have been great a few days ago %)
(see comment above, I'll try to come up with a hint about that)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

There it is.
Number 11.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Still having a go at P2 and P6.. P2 I've kind of given up by now, but P6 should be easy.. argh :-P

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

P6 should be solvable by picking 4 words out of puzzle desctiption (2 words in series, unchanged, another word unchanged, and one slightly modified) - that gave me the wikipedia article for the answer as the first google search result.
That must be the easiest way to solve it

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

puzzle desctiption

Is the title of the puzzle counted too?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Yes title is always the part of the puzzle.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

lol I was missing this hint :O
Although I am aware that your google is better than mine xd

EDIT: And this great hint gave me the answer :D

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

View attached image.
9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Are the 4 words in the question itself as well? Gah, two other people solving this puzzle with my hint :-P Not giving up!

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

No-no, no 4 words in the answer.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I got Q3 and Q4 from puzzle 5 :D

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Hint 4 should help, I guess with the first two. As long as you know the game the puzzle speaks of.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Hmm... I pretty worried about puzzle 5 having only 2 solvers, but puzzle 6 having 5 players. I guess it could be logged/not logged issue, but why 5 then?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

3 of those are me (different PCs - or even using the incognito mdoe - count as different players even if you are logged in) ^^ Not sure about the other 2 XD

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Ok, makes sense, thank you.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Maybe Starlynk/Jasmine are trying the puzzle from the work, in another PC, not being logged in.
EDIT: Jasmine beated me by 7 secs. Why she always beat me? :C

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

View attached image.
9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for puzzle 5 solved.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

You were faster than me providing hints for Q1 and Q2.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Despite the hints and multitrack drifting, I seem to be stuck.

Oh well, well played. Can't wait to see the answers.

Happy birthday and thank you, mate :)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Thanks for entering. You are one of these marvelous people, who have solved P2, though.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Yes, yes, yes! jumps

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

View attached image.
9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Congrats! :-)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for fully solved.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for answers and solutions posted. Please provide feedback on what got you stuck in the puzzles.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sure, here goes:

Got P1 and P2, which were... clear enough, I think.
P3 - not a film buff, found the clue but my Google-fu failed (keep getting the planet of the apes series, heh). Saw final clue but didn't get the cave --> cove thing.
P5 - Google and steam search failed, kept looking for some sort of "universe" "Galactic" or such.

Never reached the others.

But hey, I won P2 :) Thanks for the puzzle and GAs!

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Well, I'm deliberately trying to make my puzzle google-proof (unless expecting people to actually solve those by a simple search, as P1 or P6) and this time google failed me by providing zero results at some cases and valid indirect results at other - there must be at least two ways to solve the puzzle therefore..

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I got more demotivated than stuck. P4 and P5 turned out to be easy and solvable with some bruteforce/guesses, but seeing so few solvers, questions so vague and hints even vaguer made me not even try to solve them :P

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Yep, the order should have been thought out a bit more (like, putting the harder ones in the back, so you get motivated by the easy ones - just a single one didn't work out great).

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I got P1, P3 & P4 really fast so no feedback on those.. P2, P5 and P6 were just really dependent on knowing/guessing which game the giveaway was for. If you didn't figure out the game, it was pretty impossible to solve them and that can be demotivating as akhanubis put it.. Also, because there's not much you can do about it..

For P2 I didn't know the game and the "questions" -2, -2 didn't really help much either ;-)

Anyway I had fun with the puzzles, and was nice to have a harder puzzle sometime! I don't agree all puzzles should be easily accesible for a lot of people and it's good if some of the hardcore puzzlers have a hard time as well :-)

Oh and I won a game so yay! :-D

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Thanks. Yep, I definitely should have given more hints for the P5 game. Had an idea of relating the P2 answers/games to the 7-Eleven shops, but all the hints I could come up with seemed too obvious (should have given that one too probably).

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Dang, I won nothing :(
:P

Feedback:
P1: was easy by googling more then 1 question at the same time.
P2: guessed the host was you, the way your nick is written on your steam profile helped solve it with a pair of guesses (didn't get the right to left and left to right part, nor why "m" was gone).
P3: yandex search by image found this page which mentioned Stalker.
P4: Never heard of Game of Life, so just got lucky I guess XD
P5: thought it was Plantery Annihilation at first, then got stuck because i was thinking about q1 and q2 the wrong way (thought "bodypart" mean the main unit or something similar and similarly the "CPU module", figured it out after reading the wikipedia page fully).
P6: Needed the hint you gave to Starlynk. Still took a bit because I actually ignored that wikipedia entry at first, not recognizing it was a game name.

9 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Ah, the yandex search. Haven't used that in a while. But, I guess, you'd need to know that the movie is somehow Russian-related to use that (which wasn't obvious).
Yep, P4 was easy to bruteforce (or just make a lucky guess) - so many correct answers and so much symmetry in the question.
That hint seemed to have helped a lot (the P6 one) - a thing for me to remember for the future puzzles.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sign in through Steam to add a comment.