Volcano Island Statue Puzzle

[Glitscher]

I have some trouble with the Statue Puzzle on the Volcano Island on D4. My assumption is that I need to push the statues on the corresponding block where I can find them on the island. But I can't find the yellow statue (might be on E2, idk how to get to E2 though), so I placed all the others and tried to bruteforce it for the yellow statue, but nothing happened. Am I on the right track or completely off?

[geggis]

Originally posted by Gojirra:

Originally posted by Lee:

I would like to add that I did not come to this logical conclusion right away. My initial thought was that the last statue would be in the part of the island that is inaccessible. Failing that, I attempted to brute force the location of the last statue piece. I arrived at the solution while I was in the kitchen making myself some lunch and thought, "Maybe the yellow statue is not meant to be there. I wonder if I can destroy it."

That's awesome, thank you so much for sharing this. One of my fondest experiences from playing games as a kid was having these kinds of aha moments at later times when I wasn't playing the game, falling asleep, in a dream, etc. So that was actually a big motivator for me in the way some of the puzzles are designed.

Yeah, exactly the same for me! I did a few laps of the entire island and couldn't find the yellow statue. I was confounded. Later on, away from my computer, I thought 'What if it's on that small volcanic island and the yellow statue is 'off the grid'?'. That was an exciting moment even if it came to nothing! I went back to the statue beach and stared at them. 'Well, if it's not here or there, it probably doesn't exist at all so perhaps it should be destroyed?' and *plop*, puzzle solved. It was one of my favourite moments in the game!

[lrabbt]

Originally posted by Aexis Rai:

Originally posted by Gojirra:

This is the exact reason the puzzle is designed the way it is. Being able to brute force this puzzle, and solving by accident was an absolutely terrible and unsatisfying feeling, and in fact could be outright confusing. As it stands, the puzzle is not outrageously esoteric or unfair at all.

Unfortunately, I had exactly this bad experience, and it did ruin the payoff.
I was brute forcing the position of the 6th statue. In my case it was the red one.
In the process I pushed it one tile off the board accidentally.
Then I pressed the undo button.
At that moment, the game played the puzzle solve music, locked me in place for the cutscene, and gave me a star, and meanwhile the game state looked pretty weird:

I've since learned that the intended behavior is that all of the statues are supposed to color-cycle and fade away. In my case, I saw a superposition of the color-cycling cutscene state (where the red statue was off the board) with the previous state (where the red statue was still on the board), with the latter painted over the former - so it looked like there were 7 statues, where one was static red, the duplicate of the red one was clearly color cycling and fading out, and the other five on the board appeared to have shifting outlines (because what was actually happening was that the static colored sprite was being painted on top of the color cycling animation).

And at the end of this process I still had all 6 statues that I could physically push around, while also having gained a star and unlocked a key and a black gem.
It felt very underwhelming and I had to chat to a friend to figure out what I missed.

However: This was on a previous update of the game. I haven't seen anybody else make a note of the bug I encountered, and my skim of all the patch notes doesn't suggest that it was specifically targeted. But I just now tried to reproduce it on the current version, and I couldn't.
So I had this bug, which I chalked up to the undo system being shaky. Soon after that I began to repeatedly encounter the air elemental crash bug and frustratedly put the game down for a few weeks until stuff got fixed. It looks like hopefully those problems are gone now.

=====

Notes on my experience of this puzzle:

1) Soon enough after I first noticed a statue on that island, I gained access to every room on the island (except I think E2 which wasn't there at the time), so I did what I thought was a rigorous scan over every room, and I did find more. But I finished, and I hadn't found 6. (I had found 3 or 4.)

So, I began a second scan... and I found another. Instantly this tells me, "wow, I actually missed some the first time - maybe I just suck at looking for things even when I'm trying really hard". Well, at the end of the second scan, I had found 5 - but since I've established that I might just suck at searching... what if I just messed it up again the second time?
So for good reason I was now exhausted and wary of doing yet another search, when the idea arose to just brute force the 6th one.

2) In my case I just did not want to bother doing another scan, but I do feel bad about brute forcing, so I made an effort to think of alternatives before I resorted to that.

a) The first alternative has been mentioned previously in the thread:
So I can't find the red statue anywhere... oh wait, it's the fire guardian! He's red. He even has horns very similar to how the little statue has! That must be it, very clever.
I place the red statue on the tile representing the guardian's room. Nothing.

b) Well... I'm supposed to be placing all of these statues on the board corresponding to the rooms they are found in. All the other statues are found in some other room... Ah, but the red one, the odd one out, is only found here in the puzzle room, so maybe that's where I should mark it. A self-referential thing. Kind of clever / cheeky.
Oh, even better - on the map screen itself, when I move the map cursor over the statue puzzle room, there's an icon in the top right - an image of the red statue! How did I miss that! This must be it.
I place the red statue on the tile representing the statue puzzle room itself. Nothing.

(Of course it didn't occur to me that this puzzle would be randomized. The water island's dragonflies' initial positions were clearly deliberately chosen, so why shouldn't these positions be? I had no idea that I'm being totally misled here by the combination of (i) how the missing statue color is randomized while at the same time (ii) the map icon sprite for the statue puzzle room is not randomized and in fact is always the red one!)

3) So then I can't think of anything else (since I still am not convinced that there's definitely only 5) and I start brute forcing it.
If the game had worked properly at that time, I would have rigorously tried every position for the red statue, it would have failed everywhere, and then I would surely realize something's afoot. But instead I encountered this bizarre bug and concluded, "huh, I guess I brute forced it? and also the undo system went visually wonky at the same time? whatever."
I have footage of the bug happening. (Amusingly enough, the red statue's ""solved position"" when this bug got triggered ended up being in E2, which was the other alternative I could have thought up at the time (when E2 was inaccessible) but it didn't occur to me.)

This is exactly what happened to me just now, then I came here, because it felt weird. It wasn't patched out.