I just got through the music notes puzzle (near the waterwheel)

[dunbaratu]

This puzzle is extremely unfair and designed really badly. I wanted to avoid a cheat so I eventually gave up on looking for the clue meticulously everywhere over and over, and just sat there methodically trying all possible combinations (there's 81 combos total: 3x3x3x3, so I worked through all of them one by one until I got a hit). It takes a long time because each attempt is followed by a slow animation sequence of the notes being played back to you.

After I got it working I then read a walkthrough to see if there was a better way than the way that took hours and hours of boredom. I was really annoyed to find that the solution involves a clue that you can no longer witness anymore once you get to the puzzle, and it's a clue that might have been literally undetectable the first time back when it was still being given, depending on your settings and your circumstances. (No, I don't mean "you might not have been paying attention back then", I mean "you might literally never have been shown the information based on your settings at the time the clue was supposed to be happening.") Once you get to the puzzle, the clue is GONE from the game and you can look forever and the game will never show it to you ever again.

The actual clue and why it's unfair, is explained in the spoiler section below:

The clue is in a tune that the two creatures you had to fight were supposedly humming to themselves. I never heard such a tune and only found out about it from reading the walkthrough. Why did I not hear such a tune? Because my volume was set low, I fought them from a distance, and other noises were in the room where the computer was where I was playing. Once I got to the puzzle and started searching around for something with those symbols written down, or something emitting a tune I might hear, those two guards were dead and no longer making the sound. I imagine how massively unfair the puzzle would be to people who are playing with subtibles only and no sound. By the time you realize this is a sound-based puzzle and go turn the volume up, the clue you were supposed to hear already happened and will never happen again, and you have no way to know that without reading a walkthrough. You'll waste a LOT of time trying to find the clue in vain, under the assumption they wouldn't design the game in such a way that you can never witness the clue anymore.

And before anyone says that this wouldn't have happend if I'd snuck past the guards instead of killed them, keep in mind that nothing in the game clues you in to the fact that killing them is a failure condition. You keep playing from that point not realizing that you're stuck in dead end now.

[CrazyOdd]

I guess you havent played the original game. Since these types of puzzles where commen in it.
There where a lot of puzzles that had next to no clues and you just had to spend the time finding the solution.

[dunbaratu]

Incorrect. I did play the original game. I never recall any puzzles like this one in which the information needed to get the solution only occurred once and was never going to appear again when you walk back there, and is presented in a way that might be entirely undetectable on that first and only time that it happens. That's what made this puzzle be bad design.

It's not that there was "next to" no clues. It's that if you didn't happen to have the volume turned up quite high at a point in the game that occurs *prior* to finding out that there's an audio puzzle coming up in the near future, then there's not "next to" no clues - there's *literally* no clues. The user is never presented with the clue after the first time, and the game doesn't know how loud the volume was turned up that first time. It just presumes the user had been presented with their one-time clue when in fact they might not have ever even been presented with it. There's a big difference between "the user was presented with the clue and if they don't remember it or weren't paying attention that's their problem", which is acceptable in these sorts of games, versus what happened here which was "the game tricks itself into thinking it had presented it to the user once when it hadn't."

I wouldn't have minded having to try 81 different combinations, it's an easy algorithm, were it not for the fact that each attempt means sitting through about 30 seconds of animation.

[CrazyOdd]

Originally posted by madings:

Incorrect. I did play the original game. I never recall any puzzles like this one in which the information needed to get the solution only occurred once and was never going to appear again when you walk back there, and is presented in a way that might be entirely undetectable on that first and only time that it happens. That's what made this puzzle be bad design.

True, but there where puzzles with no info about what to do beyond the obvius. Like the crystals bellow water.

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by Chiobe:

True, but there where puzzles with no info about what to do beyond the obvius. Like the crystals bellow water.

Yeah but at least they *had* an obvious "what to do". Randomly guessing what the tune is that you never actually heard and taht will never happen again (and you don't know it will never happen again so you keep searching for it) isn't obvious at all.

[CrazyOdd]

Originally posted by madings:

Originally posted by Chiobe:

True, but there where puzzles with no info about what to do beyond the obvius. Like the crystals bellow water.

Yeah but at least they *had* an obvious "what to do". Randomly guessing what the tune is that you never actually heard and taht will never happen again (and you don't know it will never happen again so you keep searching for it) isn't obvious at all.

The only obvious thing was that you needed to place the crystals in the slots, but nothing beyond that. 4 crystals, 4 slots, 3 sides. Takes time to get down.

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by Chiobe:

Originally posted by madings:

Yeah but at least they *had* an obvious "what to do". Randomly guessing what the tune is that you never actually heard and taht will never happen again (and you don't know it will never happen again so you keep searching for it) isn't obvious at all.

The only obvious thing was that you needed to place the crystals in the slots, but nothing beyond that. 4 crystals, 4 slots, 3 sides. Takes time to get down.

That is significantly fewer options to work through. Because you know you have to put one crystal in each slot, you know it's a situation of selection without replacement. And If I recall, you got clues telling you when it was partly right, which also helps.

With the notes puzzle you don't know if all the notes are used, or if any of them are repeats. All you know is that it's 4 notes long, which makes it 3 to the 4th.

[Aanton]

I had this game on xbox and I was playing it with no sound on and had not been saving for hours...Another thing that sucks is the dreamfall price.. What 20euro for a game this old ??

[Trent]

I'm with you 100%, madings. There is one other place you hear it-- when you first activate the device with the lamp (?)-- sorry, it's been a while since I've played. I remember hearing the chords as a nice piece of soundtrack for accomplishing a piece of a puzzle...but that's it. I don't know that I even noticed the little guys were humming, and I killed them in pretty short order.

But agreed...it's bad to have a puzzle where you can easily get in a situation where you have to revert to trial and error. And it would be really easy to fix: either play the tones each time you activate the device, or have a creature respawn after a while.

[dunbaratu]

It's not the fact that the game got stuck in a place where you had to revert to trial and error that made it bad design. What made it bad design is that the game designers *thought* they had presented the information when they hadn't. They are not in control of my volume knob, nor can they read it's position. So when the one-time-only clue is given at a moment when the volume knob wasn't turned up and I have no reason yet to guess that an audio puzzle is coming up in the near future, because I haven't gotten to it yet, then the game *thinks* it has presented me with information that it in fact has never shown me yet. Playing a tune while I don't have the volume turned up does not qualify as having given me the information.

As the game has a mode where you can play with subtitles turned on, the fact that sound is essential to the game is not a thing you can anticipate prior to this puzzle. At no point during the gameplay before this puzzle was there a reason you couldn't play silently with the subtitles only.

[Mr. Moyer]

If you beat the spear-monsters the way you're SUPPOSED TO, by throwing the pebble to distract them INSTEAD of beating them up, then you can go back and listen to them humming the tune again. So it isn't as bad as you're making it sound; you just have to remember that this is the type of game that rewards you for being clever rather than brute force.

[Trent]

I used the pebble on the one guy and got past him. I don't recall if you can even use the pebble on the other one. But either way, having a puzzle where you can easily get in a situation with no solution (other than extensive trial and error) is bad design, IMO.

And like madings said, if you have your volume down, you can be as peaceful as Ghandi and still never solve the puzzle.

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by dj_moyer:

If you beat the spear-monsters the way you're SUPPOSED TO, by throwing the pebble to distract them INSTEAD of beating them up, then you can go back and listen to them humming the tune again. So it isn't as bad as you're making it sound; you just have to remember that this is the type of game that rewards you for being clever rather than brute force.

You are lying. Not in your claim that this is a way to get the clue, but in your claim that there's any hints whatsoever to the fact that killing the guards is a failure condition, and in your dishonest claim that the only way you'd end up killing the guards is because you are trying to brute force your way through. You are perfectly aware of the fact that the spear-monsters can and will initiate the fight against you whether you're attempting to play brute-force or not. I did use the pebbles. It didn't work. Maybe I wasn't far enough away for the sneaking to work. Maybe I was too far away and thus it took too long to get through the dangeours area. But for whatever the reason the stealth failed and in that circumstance given how the puzzle worked the CORRECT thing woukd be to make that be a failure condition in which the game kills you and makes you restart the scene (like it does in plenty of other places), or sets the guard's difficulty very high to make it clear that a fight is not the answer. But it did neither of those. Instead it:

(A) Gave you a combat system earlier in the game and made a plot point of preventing you from advancing to this point until after you'd showed you were competent at it and made it through the combat lesson with your teacher.

and

(B) Made the spear-things quite easy to defend against and beat using this combat system if your attempt to use the stealth option didn't work and they attacked you.

and

(C) Constrast this with other cases in which combat was NOT an option to win with and failed stealth literally required a restart of the scene - like when dealing with the spider in the apartment.

All of this taken together falsely communicates to the player that this scene is UNLIKE the others in which stealth is required to continue the plot, and in fact the fact that THEY ATTACK FIRST (Don't give me any of this "brute force" garbage like I *chose* to fight), and they are a lot easier to fight than anything else you've encountered so far, all point to saying "you haven't screwed up your game at all by ending up fighting them. This was an expected and accpetable way that we meant to allow the player to get through this bit, and it's fine." Which, is, of course. false. It's not fine. You've screwed up the game from that point onward by aborting the chance to hear the clue you didn't know existed yet, and now never will.

There are plenty of occasions in which the game does not allow you to get through a botched stealth attempt and continue on, and plenty of occasions in which the game does in fact excpect you to be forced to use the fight system as the intended solution. This should have been designed as one of the cases where fighting doesn't succeed. But it was designed like one of the other cases, where fighting looked like the intended solution.

The player cannot distinguish the difference between "the stealth method will work, but it's just hard and will take several tries to get it right" from "the game is designed for stealth to not work here and it will be futile to keep trying it". This is not hypothetical, it actually described my experience with the game. I did try the pebble throws. I did distract the guard and try to stealth by. I got caught and forced into the fight each time. After several repeats of this, each one of which ending in a fight where I was able to beat the guard, I eventually got the impression that the game didn't intend to let the stealth option be a soltuion here. "Obviously if it meant for me not to fight, it wouldn't keep making the stealth option fail while making the combat they force me to take part in work very easily by comparison." The fact that it gave me an enemy that's easier to fight than other's I've encountered reinforces this impression.

The far simpler explanation is that they did not intend to make the stealth option be a mandatory thing here, and wanted the ability to win the fight that occurs when stealth fails to be an acceptable way to continue the plot, but then just made a mistake in that they failed to notice the dead-end problem this creates for the next puzzle.

It's easy not to be conscious of the problem if you're one of the playtesters because the failure to present information that you need isn't as obviously noticable if its information you already know from your previous playthroughs as a tester. Instead you try fighting the guards, it works, then you try the puzzle later, and it works when you use the right combo you've memorized and you say "yup, no bug here. This option works." - not entirely conscious of the fact that you just used information the player who had ONLY played through that way wouldn't have.

[irecorsan]

I just went through this part and noticed that, everytime you get up and down the staircase at the end of the wheel, a background melody plays which repeats the tune in different scales, regardless of whether you killed the creatures or not. So I guess that forgives a bit the difficulty of this puzzle (I had to check it either way because I don't have a good music ear).