Monday, June 5, 2017

News:: Fear Effect Sedna has a very bad puzzle, worse dialogue

I was at the very end of Fear Effect Sedna's Digital Dragons demo when I came across a puzzle that I couldn't quite solve. The first major puzzle in Sedna forced me to explore the environment to defuse a bomb, and I actually kinda liked that! It felt like I was playing an adventure game from the early aughts – which sounds about right, considering that's when the first Fear Effect came out.

But yikes, that last server puzzle. Even the positive reviews on Steam mention the puzzle as a low point, and it's not hard to see why. The textures in this particular level either don't have the solution, or obfuscate the answer so well that you're stuck looking at the servers for a solution.

Looking at the code input screen, what do you think the answer is? At first, I thought it was 351682; eliminate the red numbers and just input the green digits from each block of numbers. Nope. 356182; read the numbers horizontally? Nope. 315268; organize each block of numbers in ascending order based on the icons in the upper right? Nope. I'll give you a hint: it's not any permutation of those six numbers.

I've got a fairly strong ego, so I've never been averse to asking for help during previews. Except that didn't do me a lick of good, because all three people manning the Fear Effect booth weren't able to figure out the puzzle either. We puzzled and puzzled until our puzzlers were sore – poking around the environment, trying all the permutations mentioned above, the whole business. There were four video game professionals working on this and we still couldn't figure it out. Eventually, one of the reps texted a member of the development team looking for the answer. The word came back: "481376."

"Huh," one of the reps said. "That doesn't make any sense."

Fear Effect Sedna has a very bad puzzle, worse dialogue screenshot

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via destructoid http://ift.tt/2sJMwer