I’d like to ask the good people of this community that, if you do know the solution or figure it out, that you not share the answer here. Feel free to announce your success, but there’s something to be said for discovering the answer completely unaided, even if it takes years.
It’s embarrassingly obvious once you see it though.
Figured it out. Not sure what everyone means by a second obvious solution that doesn’t work on the last one. My first solution that works on more than one works on all of them.
Ever play the game Myst? As a kid that’s exactly how it was. Days of banging my head and then a rush of finally figuring something out. Really miss that
Loved that game and every game in that series. Part of the fun was being dropped into this world with no clues and just having to feel your way around.
I admit that I surrendered after a while and got a walkthrough, which was followed by several hours of, “Oh for fucks sake I could have figured that out!”
Every once in a while I definitely needed the walkthrough too. I hear blue price hits the same feeling. My wife and I just need to find time to dive into it together
I recommend Outer Wilds then.
Go in as blind as possible. They recommend a controller over mouse and keyboard and they mean it. The DLC is just as good as the base game, but I’d tackle it after doing the main objective.
Outer Wilds or Outer Worlds because I’ve heard good things about both but know nothing about either.
I have played Chants of Zenaar some which also hits the feeling.
Outer wilds.
Outer Worlds is just a fairly mediocre sci-fi RPG (IMHO).
Outer Wilds.
I think The Outer Worlds was just an RPG.
Wilds is a mystery game of aha moments.
Take a look on tunic, but it comes with some combat action, which may not be what you are looking for.
You can turn that down and I highly recommend doing so.
I found the combat to be quite obnoxious.
I’ve looked at Tunic before but it always looked more like Zelda to me. I dunno why but I’ve always bounced off Zelda.
I don’t like Zelda games myself but loved tunic. The puzzles are completely different than Zelda, much more interesting. The other commenter mentioned you can tone the combat down. Maybe worth a try if it is on sale.
I was more of a Return to Zork kid. I’d work my way up to each character, and then kill that character to see their death scene. Then I’d start over and work my way to the next. I got all the way to the vulture at the cave, and stopped playing because I was told there were no more people to murder after that.
I always got eaten by the grue sadly.
Did you ever read the tie-in novels?
I have, I picked up the Myst Reader which collects all three from a used book sale a while back. I remember them being a fun read. Nothing mind blowing but a fun jaunt through more Myst
For everyone saying it’s the difference between the two numbers, it’s not it. Because the last one should be 8 to follow the rule
Oh shit, I thought it was OP just being a dummy. Turns out I’m the dummy
Figured it out. Weirdly, knowing you solved it made me confident I could too, and I don’t even know you 🤔
spoiler
I focused on the anomaly ignoring the rest, tried to see what possible rules could lead to it, then went back to see which rule also applied to the “non-anomalous” numbers.
Yes, the hint that the answer was obvious once you knew it was extremely helpful.
I’m not that quick with math, so knowing that the answer was going to be simple helped a lot. Every time I had an idea that was too complicated, I shelved it and kept looking for something that might be simpler.
It also helped that I was a camp counselor, and one of our survival techniques was to have riddles with simple rules that the counselors were able to operate very easily, but which the kids used lots of brain power to try to figure out.
This is exactly how George Bernard Dantzig proved two previously unproven statistical theorems, when he thought they were homework assignments.
Once I saw a video about Mario Kart speedrunning history and there was a record on Rainbow Road that lasted for years. Than someone broke it but just told the community without showing how it was done. In a couple of days someone else figured it out and did it too. Sometimes we just need to know it is possible
Amazing story 💫
Thank you
I think I figured it out, but it’s so easy that I don’t think that could possibly be it. But it is, apparently.
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Free clue: It’s not 15. That solution doesn’t work for the bottom numbers, and it’s very clearly stated that the 7 is not a typo.
Edit: What makes this puzzle so good is that it tempts you with an “obvious” solution that works with all but the last set, but there’s an equally obvious solution that does fit every set, if you can shake yourself free of the fist one.
Thanks but I’ll ignore the last set and win
(╯°-°)╯︵ ┻━┻
I wish I saw this first. I’m very prone to off-by-one errors.
I opened the comments thinking that I solved it, then some comments with broken spoiler tags essentially spoiled the actual answer for me, despite my best efforts to ignore them.
With these types of puzzles, I normally start looking for solutions that don’t just involve the obvious operations. Had I seen your comment first, I would’ve continued playing with the first thing I noticed (and later abandoned for the wrong solution) and I think I would’ve got there by myself eventually.
Either others need to be more mindful of their spoiler tags, or I need to stop using Sync for Lemmy. It’s probably the latter; I’ve seen such weird formatting that only makes sense if I assume Sync’s Markdown renderer is broken.
Non-bastardized version:

Oh that’s easier to read in me eyes
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Ah, typo is short for typographical error. I’v never realized that before.
I figured it out took about 10 minutes, thought i was onto it immediately until I had 8 at the end haha
What the heck man I have things to do today.
20 minutes. 2 minutes of elation. This is unethical to post without content warnings.
Wow so easy, I got this in negative 4 second, literally 4 seconds before I even saw the puzzle. Of course I’m not going to share the solution here because I don’t want to ruin It, but I definitely got it.
How do we know if we’re right then?
You’ll feel a sudden, unmistakable rush of self-confidence.
You solve for it.
If the answer you get is right, you’ll be able to apply it to every trio and get the number on the “line”. It’s kinda like how you can plug in your answer into a quadratic equation to double check you got it right.
Took me about 20 minutes. There’s a rule you find first that would work if the 7 was an 8. But it isn’t. So there’s another rule.
until I read your comment I was puzzled as to why anyone would consider something so straightforward a “masterpiece”, but yeah, it’s quite a clever piece of misleading on the puzzle-setter’s part.
I’m sute Matt Parker has made a video about this.
Damn haha
Got it. Very misleading puzzle, haha.
I’m really confused. What was misleading?
There is one obvious rule that almost works but doesn’t fit one number. This distraction draws your attention, making you more likely to miss the actual rule. It’s a kind of misdirection.
Your comment helped me solve it.













