How to assemble the Mountain Door Key

How to put together the golden path needed to open the final door of the game.

Clipping The Manual Pages

Intro

I know I'm not the first to do this - but I did it without googling and really enjoyed the experience. Thought I'd share the fruits of my labour for anyone interested in how to solve the last big puzzle of the game.

Like many of the smaller puzzles, the final door requires using the "Holy Cross" (cross-pad on the controller, or cursor keys on the keyboard) to enter a key sequence based on a hidden path.

Assembling the pieces

Manual page 49 shows a 5x5 grid of numbers. These numbers refer to pages of the manual. Within each indicated page, a part of the golden path can be found - all except page 9 which requires a little more work.

I took a screenshot of each page and clipped the relevant area, pasting them into the grid - which yielded the following - I've added some brushwork where the lines are faint:


One thing to be careful of is that some tiles have quite subtle perpendicular lines crossing the path - which are used to indicate a stop point requiring an additional keypress. Page 52 in the top right is a good example of this; the small vertical line crossing the path is barely visible.

Page 9 is particularly challenging:


This has no golden path piece! Instead, you should start the game, go to Load game, Cancel, Go back and by magic a new save file appears with a golden square with a question mark against it. Load this game and you are stuck with an overhead view of Fox in a single room with a golden path on the floor. Walk the room to find the Page 9 pattern:

Assemble the Path from the Collage

With the assembled pieces in place you can read out the final path - which looks like this:


Input this path at the mountain door, and it will open!

Hope you have fun playing this great game.

[Lyo]

Page 22 path not touching tripped me up, the misprints as a whole form an inverted L that also appears correct. Pretty fun to find all the others though.

[JnvSor]

"Without googling" *proceeds to mark page 22 screenshot wrong*

[Guardian]

The number of bullshitters drawing this out like they figured it out themselves is staggering. Rofl

[KILLKERWOLF]

thanks man:) I appreciate that kind of job

[Cybernetic Ñyewt]

Cheers to anyone playing the game in 2024! Literally did everything except the door, got gaslit into thinking that the golden path was for something else. Eventually caved and looked, found that I made an error. Had the entire thing written down except I missed one dash

[HQ]

I don't think I would have gotten this on my own. My brain was just shutting down looking at a grid of numbers, and it didn't occur to me that the only other place I'd seen numbers in this game were on the pages of the booklet! So crazy, what a rush.

[Lonekus]

I did figured the path for all before looking at this guide, was not able to open the door yet due to few slight error

[superclone53]

I saw this, and I still dont understand.

[Freya]

Nevermind. Just checked your game reviews and you are constantly complaining about games for having lots of puzzles. Like how you praised the modern internet while complaining about Monkey Island for having puzzles... you know, the classic Point-&-Click Puzzle game

[Freya]

@xenman Because this is a puzzle game and the puzzles are the main appeal of the game. You don't look at the cover box of a jigsaw puzzle and think "I already solved it cuz the full picture is there in the box!", right?.

Not to mention the director said that this puzzle-adventure game was designed for those who wanted a fun and nostalgic experience for us who grew up without access to the internet and grew up trying to figure a game out like Zelda by reading a manual on a language that we couldn't even understand. Which I think many people here could feel identified with.

PS: Insulting the game designer by saying "why they spend s much time doing this when i spend 2 mins online to crack it. :D" is just a very rude and dumb thing to say in general. As this is a puzzle-adventure game that was made mostly by a single person in 9 years.