Game 1, Puzzle 4: The Matrix
If you look closely at the office picture, which is the access point for all the puzzles in The Missing Mr. E game, you will see the large lamp on the far left side. Above that lamp, scrawled into the wood frame around the window is the phrase “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT”. This is where the players found the link the fourth puzzle.
I call it The Matrix.
I got the idea from the movie by the same name (obviously). Originally I intended this to look much cooler than it ended up as. I wanted it to look something like this:
But that’s okay, it served it’s purpose.
So where do you go with this puzzle? I can tell you that it didn’t take players very long to figure that out because this puzzle was solved the fastest at 1 hour and 4 minutes.
At first glance it appears to be a series of zeros and ones. Binary language perhaps? I hoped that might slow players down a bit as they pursued that angle (I was wrong). How about the different colors of black, blue, red, and green? Surely that must mean something. Sorry, another red herring. A clever deception that apparently didn’t fool anyone either.
Maybe the phrase “What hath God wrought” means something. Yes, now you’re on the right track. Typing this into a search engine and a short amount of investigation reveals that, among other things, this was the first message sent by morse code on May 24th, 1844 by Samuel Morse (see pic on left) marking the official opening of the telegraph system.
If you know morse code then you know that it is a series of dashes and dots that when combined together in certain patterns represent the alphabet. This could also be sent electrically by telgraph as a series of audible “dits” (dots) and “dahs” (dashes).
Now that you know this, if you look at the puzzle again it’s solution is perhaps more clear. In this case rotating the puzzle 90 degrees counter-clockwise reveals that the 1’s now look like dashes and the 0’s now dots. All you need is a handy dandy translation key (see right) and you can begin to solve the puzzle.
Soon you may notice that although you’re translating the code into actual words, together they don’t make much sense. Here is the second last stumbling block I threw in there. I coded the sentence in reverse order. I guess my hope was that players wouldn’t be able to understand the sentence until you completely solved it instead of solving half of it and guessing what the last half would be or something like that.
So once solved the solution now poses the player with a question. A riddle to be more precise. My last attempt to increase the complexity of the puzzle. And what is the riddle? Well, you’re going to have to figure that out for yourself. I have to leave some mystery and challenge for you. I can tell you that the correct answer reveals the next number in the sequence which is 19.
Do you have the skills to finish solving it? Let’s see:
A place to find unique and challenging puzzles and occasionally a competitive puzzle contest where you compete against others to solve a series of puzzles wrapped around an original story line.
