the lonely barrow puzzle

[Icedfate]

yeah, i know the solution use elemental cantrips on the pedestals but what bugs me is how is the player "supposed" to figure that out?
the only clue is you enter the room and you see 4 pedestals. one of them can be examined and it just says there is soot on it.
the others cannot be examined or interacted with in any (obvious) way.
the only other clue is a bas relief of a cyclops in a whirlpool.

and the player is supposed to make a fantastic leap of logic here that obviously the soot is from someone casting fire on that pedestal , so the other 3 pedestals represent the other elements and you're supposed to cast the appropriate spells on them, even though they look like background objects and nowhere else in the game did it even establish to the player this hidden mechanics that they can cast spells targeting background objects.
no other puzzle in the game makes the player do this. it's a game mechanic that the game keeps hidden from you. why would you even think to do this?
.
yeah, the kineticist DLC has a similar puzzle, that's actually easier to figure out, and if you did figure out the puzzle at the sorrowflow, then you should know that you can do itmhere too, but how did people solve it before the DLC?
i understand the logic of the solution, i just don't under how i was supposed to make that leap in logic. this is like.. . sherlock holmes levels of logic leaping

[Icedfate]

meanwhile, the targeting on it is so finicky, that you might have actually thought of it on your own and tried it but then because it's so finicky that you were off by a pixel and it didn't work, you would come to the conclusion that you did it wrong and that's not actually the solution and then give up and look at a guide and it tells you and you're like "wtf, i tried that!" and then you go back and do it and it works. .

so i dunno, maybe there's another clue somewhere? is it hidden in one of the lore dump books?
like, i know i complained about the herb you have to put in the box at the abandoned hut. . but then i actually did find the clue. it's in one of the notes that the stag lord's father wrote in his madness, and it's a huge wall of text, but in one tiny part he mentions offhandedly how he hid "something" in his "herb storage" and i guess the player is "supposed" to pick up on it that the father hid something and then make the leap that the "herb storage" might be at the hut, where he used to live. .and then you get there and there's an empty storage container and then you make another leap that this must be the "herb storage" even though there's no indication that herbs were ever stored. .except in the memory dialogue you see of the father yelling at the child stag lord because he didnt bring back enough herbs. . and then there's a shrine outside the hut that says something about "greens".
the puzzle would have been way more obvious if instead of a storage box, it was an offering plate on the altar, then the player could make the leap "oh , i need to put something there!"

but anyway, at least that one HAD a clue, as obscure as it was

[Yaeri]

Yeah I was wondering about this too. I sat there thinking it was maybe a reference to the movie the fifth element.

[Chloe]

https://youtu.be/0KRgRwezgPE

[Icedfate]

yeah, so often when I get stuck on a puzzle and look for the solution, everyone online always just shows the answer without any explanation of how they GOT to that answer.
so I get stuck and i'm like, "how TF do i figure this out?" and i look for spoilers and they just say "here's the answer" and it's just giving me the fish, not teaching me how to fish and i never get any better at solving puzzles like this,

one (major) problem with this puzzle is that it relies on knowledge of a not obvious, somewhat hidden game mechanic.

the fact that you can cast spells onto things in the environment. this is never explained anywhere else in game. never hinted at. it's only ever even used in 2 places. only here and only once in the kineticist DLC.

in good game design, it would teach you the mechanics not by an info dump, but by presenting you with situations where you have to learn the mechanics to progress, you learn the mechanics by playing the game.

example : super mario bros, it's press a to jump. then you see a goomba, you jump on it (actually when i was a kid, i didn't think of this, because i was used to playing games where enemies kill you if they touch you so maybe that's a bad example, i dunno, the instructions manual actually tells you that you can do this, but i never read those things . .. ) , but then it shows you bricks blocks and you jump onto them or hit them from below. a mushroom pops out, oh, it made me big, i hit a brick from below, oh now i can break it. i move forward a bit and now there's a pipe in front of me, how do i get over it? press A to jump!

this game never made it clear that you can cast spells onto things in the environment so i never even thought to do that

[willfreedo]

Agreed on everything. The DLC "puzzle" with the bonfires around the water elementals also annoyed me: it was the only instance so far (and apparently this is the only other one in the entire game?) where you can interact like that with background elements that lack an icon or outline. This one's worse. And the reward being so underwhelming... I'm not sure if that makes it more acceptable or even worse.

Originally posted by Icedfate:

this pizzle

Even if it was a typo, still an appropriate name for this kind of piss puzzles.

[Icedfate]

it was a typo, and i just edited my post to fix it. . thanks for the compliment.

[Radiac]

Most of the puzzles in Kingmaker just outright suck. They're not terribly fun, interesting, or well-implemented in the game mechanics, and some of them are antithetical to the story.

Like the sword puzzle in Aldori Manor. There's a whole subplot about you getting framed for stealing a sum of 200GP from the guard's payroll in a different room, but Tartuccio and Jamadi both COMPLETELY ignore the fact that you looted two rooms that were very clearly hiding the really good stuff, which, like almost all of the loot that the puzzles in the game gate, was actually very disappointing to boot. Nugrah's herb chest is barely even a puzzle, and the fact that he has another one in the Stag Fort would lead you to think there may be more herb chests in other places later on in the game, but none exist, so it causes people to carry herbs around forever and try to use them like that to no avail. And the book puzzle in the House at the Edge of Time makes use of the annoying inventory item stacking system to misdirect you. To explain that, there are some objects, like Scroll of Fireball, which stack such that you can carry them in a single slot that says how many of them you have, indicated by a number. Other items, like Longswords, despite being identical, are not stackable, so you have multiple copies of them in inventory taking up different slots individually. Books, as it turns out, come in both varieties. Some books will form stacks with a number telling you how many of that book you have, which is almost always just 1 anyway, and others will not, being treated as unique in that sense. In that puzzle, some but not all of the books you need are unique, but one of them, I believe, is treated as non-unique and stackable, as evident by the fact that it has a number "1" on it in the inventory. Since all of the other books in the entire game that are stackable are pure vendor trash, like Shadows of Absalom by Pax Groometra and Cooking Almanac of the Inner Sea by Jubilost Narthropple (which should at least get you a recipe somehow, in my opinion) this is designed to make you think that all stackable books are always vendor trash, when you actually need one of them found in the HatEoT for the library puzzle. This, to me, is devs trolling players, if it was intentional, and just crap design if it wasn't. Given that you find like 15 books in that house, and that there are multiple slots to place books in the six shelves, it's already enough busy work to try to figure out which books go where, assuming you make the leap of faith that its one book per shelf, despite the fact that you could place any number of books in them. Eliminating some books as clearly not "in play" for that game because they're just vendor trash is something a lot of people would do, and the devs either know that and are intent on punishing you for it or they feel Nyrissa would set it up that way just to break the fourth wall and make the HatEoT as annoying as possible.

I just look up spoilers for all of the puzzles and always have since day 1. Most of them were solved by being brute-forced by other players trying every possible combination or whatever anyway.