I playedDishonored 2for an hour this morning, but I only had my hands on the controller for 20 minutes. The rest of the session I was seated at my desk, and I definitely looked like I was working hard, not enjoying my daily hour of gaming time before I start working hard. But, that effort was okay because, in the end, I solved the Jindosh Riddle without any help.
Dishonored 2’s Logic Puzzle That Stopped Me In My Tracks
Kirin Jindosh is a major figure in Dishonored 2, and the target of its iconic missionThe Clockwork Mansion. Not long after dispatching Jindosh, you come across a mechanized door he designed. This large door bears five written names and five hieroglyph-style images engraved on rotating dials. There are 120 possible combinations, so it is possible to brute force the solution, but it would be long, tedious work. If you’re game, there is a riddle nearby to solve, which will grant you access to the other side of the door, allowing you to skip straight to the next level.
Here’s the first big chunk, which provides a good idea of how knotty the riddle is.
“The women sat in a row. They all wore different colors and Countess Contee wore a jaunty green hat. Doctor Marcolla was at the far left, next to the guest wearing a purple jacket. The lady in white sat left of someone in blue. I remember that white outfit because the woman spilled her wine all over it. The traveler from Karnaca was dressed entirely in red. When one of the dinner guests bragged about her Ring, the woman next to her said they were finer in Karnaca, where she lived.”
This is the version of the Jindosh Riddle that I read, but the proper nouns are randomly swapped around each time you play the game.
The riddle concludes that, after this wild and crazy night, there were four objects left under the table where the women were gathered: a ring, a bird pendant, a diamond, and a snuff tin. You need to match each accessory to the woman who brought it by making logical deductions from the tangentially related facts relayed in the riddle. When I first read through it, attempting to solve the puzzle from the comfort of my couch, zero percent of the information stuck in my head. I read it again, hoping I could stay on my couch, then gave up and went to get something to write with. I grabbed a pocket-sized notebook, and began sketching out the scene, beginning with five circles in a row, one for each of the women.
Devising A Solution To Devise A Solution
But, those little memo book pages weren’t big enough to contain all the important information I needed to track. The women’s names, their hometowns, the colors they were dressed in, the beverages they were imbibing, the objects they boasted about — there were too many data points and I couldn’t get them to fit on the page in a coherent way.
So, I moved to my desk and pulled out a sheet of computer paper and began sketching the scene. This provided enough space, but I kept getting close to solving the riddle, then realizing I had made a mistake that negated all my answers. Writing in pen, this was difficult to undo, and I ended up going through multiple pages before giving up and calling it a night. Even as I put my notes away for the evening, I knew deep down what I needed to do. This morning when I loaded up Dishonored 2, I cut the crap and got crafty.
The problem with my initial system was that I needed to be able to quickly swap out the variables. Even in pencil, correcting mistakes would mean erasing large amounts of information which would make the paper a smudgy mess. This is a logic puzzle after all, I decided to make a grid, with one column for each of the women and one row for each variable — Home, Clothes, Drink, Object. From there, I took out another sheet of paper, and began writing down all the proper nouns. I wrote down Karnaca (and Green Hat, and Whiskey, etc.), then grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the words out to make them small, movable paper tiles.
Soon, I had a bunch of these little tabs, and could move them around the board like game pieces. It was a powerful visual tool and it only took about five minutes to back Jindosh into a checkmate. When I found (what I hoped was) the solution, I got up and went back to the couch, rotating each dial to match my findings. And, to my surprise, I had solved it! The door swung open and I was invited to skip the rest of the level. I’ve played puzzle-focused games my entire life. Some of my earliest gaming memories are of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on N64 and playing PC point-and-click adventures with my dad. But, this was a uniquely satisfying moment, because the game didn’t just present a tough puzzle, it pushed me to create something in order to solve it. It felt like I had solved two problems: the in-game riddle and the real-world puzzle of how to visualize all that information.
Later, I looked online and saw that you can just find the answer to the riddle around the Dust District, but I’m glad I didn’t. I wouldn’t want to be robbed of this triumph.
