A storm at sea has left you shipwrecked on a strange group of islands filled with mysterious gadgets and devices. Use your wits to solve the puzzles and escape it if you can. Archipelago is a point-and-click adventure in Flash, created by Jonathan May of Woolythinking.
All actions are performed with the mouse: movement, camera panning, picking up items and activating levers and buttons. To look around, position the mouse near the edge of the game window. A little practice is all it takes to get the feel of it, just don't press any keys on the keyboard during the game or everything you've done will be hopelessly lost, and the only recourse will be to close the game window and start again. Aside from that, the game is a remarkable adventure in simulated 3D, and shows what can be done in Flash with a bit of ingenuity.
Walkthrough Guide
(Please allow page to fully load for spoiler tags to be functional.)
Archipelago Walkthrough
The Interface
To scroll, move your mouse cursor near the edge of the game. Clicking on an island will move you to it; if you're impatient, clicking again while moving will cause you to move faster. Clicking on objects will pick them up; you can drop them on the ground by clicking there, or you can put them in your inventory by clicking on the hand in the lower right corner of the screen.
The Goal
The idea is to get the volcano to erupt. I'm not sure why. Maybe you're just really bored?
Anyway, to make the volcano erupt, you need to "activate" five boxes scattered around the islands. This roughly equates to five puzzles.
What to do
Begin by moving to the island directly in front of you (click on it). Pick up the skull and the arm bones (click on them, then put them in the hand at the lower right). The note is not useful.
Turn around about 180 degrees, and go to the island with the box and the shell. Note that it is labeled with a crude drawing of a volcano. There is a shell-shaped indentation on the top of it, but the shell sitting next to it doesn't appear to fit in...
Turn about 90 degrees to the right, and go to the island with the stone arch. Note that there is a purple circle set in the arch, and that it seems to point to a statue. Note that the pattern on the statue is composed of triangular tiles.
From the island with the statue, turn about 180 degrees and click on the island to the far right. It has another stone box on it. This one seems to require some sort of code; there are nine circles which can be cycled between red, green, yellow, blue, and no color at all.
Turn left a bit and you'll see another stone arch. This one has a yellow circle and points to a statue with a zigzag pattern. Note that although the pattern is different from that on the purple arch's statue, it consists of the same triangular tiles.
There's a sand castle ahead. Go ahead and click on the island it's on to check it out. Pick up the bone lying next to it.
Turn to the left 90 degrees and you'll see yet another statue and arch in the distance. Go over to them. This arch has an orange circle and its statue's pattern is diagonal lines composed of diamond tiles.
From this statue, turn 90 degrees to the right and you'll see an island with a stone head, to the left of one with...floating green tetrahedrons? Go to the stone head and pick up the bone lying next to it. You should now have two arms, a skull and a leg.
From the stone head island, turning some 90 degrees to the right you'll notice several of what appear to be gigantic mushrooms with blue heads. Going up to one reveals that there is a button on the side of it. Press the button and the head of the "mushroom" will turn down to reveal that it is actually a mirror.
There are four of these objects with buttons and mirrors, all of which look pretty much the same. Go up to all four of them and press the button on each.
At this point I don't know which island you're on, so for the sake of not getting lost, please go to the rock in front of the volcano. (You noticed the volcano, right? It's pretty hard to miss.) There's a control panel on top of the rock with two levers. The one on the right elevates the rock, and the one on the left doesn't seem to do anything.
Now turn around and you can see all the islands. Go to the one with a lighthouse on it; it's at the far left. There's a button on the side of it that turns the light on and off; turn the light on.
Now turn around and watch those four mirrors. Beams of colored light are shooting up from each one every ten seconds or so. On the far left you'll see another arch and statue. Go over and note that this arch has a green circle and its statue has a pattern composed of diamond tiles.
Go to the island with this statue, turn 180 degrees, and look to the left of the rightmost mirror. There's an odd bumpy grey and orange object; go over to it.
The object turns out to be a metal device with five buttons on its top, along with a leg bone. You should now have five pieces of a human skeleton. And there are five buttons! If you put a bone on a button, you'll notice that one of the pillars in the distance will move down a bit.
The way this works is, putting a bone on the button will move down the corresponding pillar by a distance depending on how many buttons are already depressed. The first button pressed moves the corresponding pillar down the least, and the last one moves a pillar down the most.
You want to arrange the pillars to make a "staircase" that you can climb to get to the telescope on top of the leftmost pillar, which doesn't move. So begin by placing a bone on the fourth button from the left, which moves down the second pillar from the left (remember, the leftmost pillar with the telescope doesn't move at all). Then place a bone on the leftmost button, which moves down the third pillar from the left. Then place a bone on the rightmost button, which moves down the fourth pillar from the left. Then place a bone on the third button from the left, then place the remaining bone on the remaining button. If at any point you put a bone on the wrong button, just take it off.
Now go over to the staircase you just made from the pillars. Climb it by clicking on the top of each pillar in sequence. Click on the telescope, and look at the ship in the distance (you start looking at the statue; the ship is up and to the left. Start by finding the horizon, then scroll left until you see the top of the ship). Note that one of the sails on the ship shows a pattern; record this pattern.
Climb back down the pillars, and return to the object with the orange buttons you put the bones on. Turn 90 degrees to the left and you'll see one of those stone boxes with some triangular buttons on top. Enter the pattern you saw on the ship (click the two buttons in the bottom left and the two buttons in the top right).
Now you need to hunt for a few items. Go to the sand castle and turn 90 degrees to the left to notice a tree with a coconut in it; go over to the tree and take the coconut. Right in the middle of all the islands there's a sandbar with a shovel and a note. Put both in your inventory. The note shows colored lines in the order green, orange, red, blue.
Go to the island with a mirror reflecting a green beam of light, and turn 90 degrees to the right. You'll see an island with a cannon on it; go to this island and put the coconut in the cannon, then light the fuse with the match. The coconut will fly out and hit...something.
Go to the sand castle and you'll find it's been destroyed by the coconut you shot it with. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get rid of a sand castle. I don't know why you didn't just, like, kick it over. Anyway, pick up the purple shell from the wreckage. Remember that stone box with the slot for a shell? Go back to it and put the purple shell in it. Turns out the blue shell has no actual use.
Remember that note? It matches with the colored beams of light.
You need to find the one place where the beams are seen in that order.
Turn around 180 degrees from the rock next to the volcano. It's the rightmost sandbar.
Okay, now what? Try digging with the shovel. Click somewhere on the sandbar to start a hole, then keep clicking on it until it stops getting bigger, then start another hole. Eventually you'll get a treasure chest. (Man, couldn't that note just have a map with an X or something?) Anyway, opening the chest reveals a huge diamond.
Directly ahead of the island with the orange buttons is one with another stone box. There's a slot on top where the diamond fits perfectly, so put the diamond in it. Two more boxes to go...
Check out the green tetrahedrons. You need to click on them in a specific order. Here's the thing: I don't actually know how to find this order! Brute force saves the day once again...click on the top left tetrahedron, then the bottom right one, then the center one, then the bottom left one, then the top right one.
Oh, great, they moved around. Well, the sequence is the same, but they're in different places now...click on the center one, then the bottom right one, then the top right one, then the bottom left one, then the top left one.
Aaaaand they moved again. Ugh. Okay, bottom left, then top right, top left, bottom right, center. Finally, they disappear and the stone head lights up. Looking at the colors and their positions, it seems like this could be the code for that one stone box with nine circles. So go back to that one stone box with nine circles (it's near the pillars) and enter the pattern on the stone head.
For the colorblind or lazy, click on the top left circle once, the top right circle once, the center circle twice, and the bottom center circle three times. One box left...
From the island with the cannon, you can see an island with five colored dots. Go up to it and you'll see the colored dots look just like the circles on the arches, and they can be placed on top of the stone box on this island.
The purple circle's statue's pattern is made of triangular tiles. The yellow circle's statue's pattern is also made of triangular tiles. The orange and green circles' statues' patterns are made of diamond tiles. The blue circle's statue has square tiles.
There are lines connecting four of the slots on the stone box. Purple and yellow both have triangular tiles, so they will be connected, as will orange and green. This means the blue circle will go on the top.
I don't know what determines the order of the rest, just which ones are paired up, but that information is sufficient to brute force the solution without TOO much brute force. If only the tetrahedrons had been so merciful.
The purple circle goes on the top left, the yellow on the top right, the green on the bottom left, and the orange on the bottom right.
All five boxes are accounted for. Go to the rock in front of the volcano, click the lever on the right to elevate it, and click the lever on the left to cause an eruption. Then click on one of the...smoke clouds...to...ride it...away?
Perhaps everything past the skull was merely the product of the protagonist's deserted archipelago-induced insanity.
Posted by: minmay
|
August 23, 2011 2:05 PM
The above walkthrough is great, but the solver figured out the tetrahedrons by brute force. Here's the solution again with an explanation.
If you click around on them, you'll notice that most of the shapes go translucent when you click, but the upper-left sort of flares up, instead. If you keep clicking around, though, you may notice that sometimes the one in the upper-right flares, too. Hopefully, you'll eventually realize that the one in the upper-right only flares if the one in the upper-left flared immediately previous.
What's going on is that the shapes will always flare if you are clicking on them in the right order. As soon as you get it wrong, it goes translucent instead. This will let you figure out the top-left, top-right, middle, bottom-left, bottom-right pattern, before the thing resets.
So I'll call that pattern
1_5
_3_
4_2
as that's the order you press the shapes in.
But you're not done yet...?
After they reset, you need to press them in the order again, except watch carefully for where the shapes move, because after they've settled down again, they all look the same.
The second order is
5_3
_1_
4_2
and then once more
3_2
_5_
1_4
Posted by: Parmeisan
|
August 23, 2011 6:56 PM