Don’t Believe His Lies Amazing Puzzle Game
I love a good mind job. Complicated puzzles and complicated games that require all kinds of inside out thinking. But what really winds my clock? Games that take a community to solve – and cannot be solved by a single individual. Or even global competitions that require an entire world to think through the problems to come up with a solution.
If you’ve read the book ‘Ready Player One’ you’ll know what I am talking about here. Or, potentially ‘Reamde’ even? Or better yet, there is a book called Endgame that created a global game of the same name with a pot of gold at the end. There has been websites with hints and phone numbers and random signs here and there. Its been an amazing hunt for that pot of gold.
If you are with me still, you probably are wired weirdly like myself and you just love these sorts of crazy difficult puzzles. If so, then boy do I have a doozy for you…
Here is an example of a puzzle that you are given. To be clear, this is puzzle 3. PUZZLE THREE! So we can see that we have some sort of a black and what puzzle that needs to be rotated and spun in order to get the message right. But there is no way to manipulate the puzzle in game. Zero.
So you are going to have to snapshot this screen and print it out. Once you have it printed out, you are going to have to cut it up and then spin and rotate it til you have it figured out. Simple enough? Yeah right.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t even try it myself. But it was this puzzle that hooked me for the game. Well, guess what, I’m going to give you this answer. It’ll be at the very bottomest of this post in case you are worried about cheating… if you are that guy.
Like I said, Reddit’s Deep Webs are all over this game, just all all all over this thing because its uber hard, and the community is just tearing this thing up trying to figure it out. I mean, someone has to win it, right?
To give you just a small taste of what I’m talking about here with this game I’ll show you some of the conversation going on for Question #38.
Just thought I’d put a post together detailing what we’ve figured out about this puzzle so far:
“PRIDIE KALENDAS IANVARIAS MMXV”
PRIDIE – “On the day before” (According to a number of translation sites).
KALENDAS – Roman word for the first day of a month.
IANVARIAS – January (due to the fact that the Romans used I’s for J’s and V’s for U’s.)
MMXV – Roman numerals for 2015.
So, put together, the first line becomes “On the day before January 1st 2015”. Seems simple enough, although this could mean December 31st in either 2014 OR 2015, depending on how you think about it.
Note: It’s been mentioned that the Roman calendar only had 29 days for December, so this could theoretically also refer to December 29th. However, it’s also been mentioned that this may not be the case (see below).
“perfer et obdura dolor hic tibi proderit olim”
This is a quote attributed to Roman poet Ovid. Translated, it means something along the lines of “Bear and endure, someday this pain will be useful to you”.
An interesting note about Ovid is that he was born in 43BC, two years after the Roman calendar was reformatted in 45BC. This calendar had 31 days in December, so this is why I personally believe the date referred to above is the 31st and not the 29th.
Finally, “TERMINUS”.
This is a latin word which means boundary/limit/end. Furthermore, Terminus also is the name of a Roman god who protected boundary markers. His name is also mentioned in Ovid’s works.
This thread for this single question in the game literally runs close to 20,000 words tearing this thing down. You should have seen the thread for 37 before they finally figured it out and were able to move on to 38! It was just going nuts. And I love the game for it. This sort of communal rabidism – to coin a term – is fantastic. If you want to read more you can check it out here: http://www.reddit.com/r/dnbhl
If you are going to tear into this thing your self, I’d avert your eyes at this point. But basically the current best guess is that the developer didn’t guess that all of the underbelly of the interwebs would jump on top of this thing to help figure it out and so the players may just be ahead of schedule with their answers. The thought is that the puzzle won’t progress until December 31st 2015. Which means these guys are going to absolutely pull themselves apart thrashing on this thing until the game unlocks the gates and progresses them forward. Feel sort of bad!
But I will say that I really am enjoying fiddling with the various questions and seeing if I can figure them out on my own. Keeps your brain limber. Or makes you insane. One or the other. Check it out if you are into these sorts of crazy riddles.
And now for the answer to the question I promised you:
