Solutions for "Alien Abduction?" by Charles Gerlach This file contains answers for all of the puzzles in Q&A format. I apologize for any lack of organization it has. A lot of the puzzles are inter-connected, so I tried to keep information local to the question at hand. The questions are in roughly chronological order (with respect to game time). ********************* Q & A ************************************** What do I need to do in this opening scene? The opening scene really just sets the mood, and gives you some background information on your character and the situation. Go north into your house, look around, get your camera out of the bedroom and head back down the path to the south, but go southeast when the path turns to the southwest. Inside the White Room: The alien is pointing to this yellow square, what do I do? The alien is just trying to run some tests on your brain. It is trying to get you to: >say "yellow" (or red, or blue, etc.) The alien has left me with these three colored shapes, what now? 1. Turning a shape will make it change color, and pushing it will make it change shape. There is a specific sequence of colored shapes that they are looking for, and the three spots that appear when you push the green button are clues as to what they're looking for. 2. A green spot means you have a correctly colored shape in the correct position of the sequence. A yellow spot means you have a correctly colored shape in the wrong place of the sequence. A red spot means that either the color or the shape at a particular place is correct, but the other attribute is wrong. A black spot indicates that one of your pieces has missed the boat entirely. 3. The solution is randomized, so there is no magic sequence I can give you. You are not limited in the number of times you can press the green button, so press it after every move. If you've downgraded one of your colors, (You used to have a green and two blacks, but now you have a red and two blacks) repeat your action twice more to cycle the piece back to it's original state. If a green spot appears after one of your moves, leave the piece that you just moved alone. When three green spots appear, a door will open, and you can go out. Q: Now I'm back behind my house, but it seems like something is wrong. How can I tell what's wrong? You are apparently in a simulation of your house and the town. If you examine the trees and touch them, you will see that they are textureless. Also, if you look for your trusty thinking stump, you will find that it is now a tree with initials carved into it, like it was ten years ago. Read the initials to get the story behind that. Q: What's the deal with this contraption in the woods? 1. The aliens are trying to get a grasp of human insight, and are going to make you solve puzzles in order to accomplish this. This puzzle is how to get the duck out without losing your arm. 2. Fortunately, you take to puzzles like a duck takes to water. :-) 3. Or is it all that simple? The axe doesn't look very threatening-- if you've seen the broken hoe, you know that the force fields that make up the town don't make good tools. You could probably just grab the duck and get away with it. 4. Okay, so they weren't happy that you tried the brute force solution, and they reset the puzzle, but this time they've put a real axe on the spring arm. It looks like you better solve it correctly this time. Was it worth getting a bruise over? I bet having a real axe around might come in handy later... 5. Complete solution: just grab the duck the first time. You'll get a nasty bruise on your arm. When you leave, they'll drug you and reset the contraption. Next time, pour water from the well into the cylinder, and then get the duck. If you give the duck and the broken hoe to Pop in town, you'll get a real hoe. Q: What's the deal with my Dad? 1. This is the question that the game really centers about. What happened to your dad, and is the same thing going to happen to you? Your father has been in the asylum for ten years, and yet here he is, looking just like he did ten years ago, thinking that he's only been gone a couple months. Something is wrong. 2. Have you noticed that he clicks when he blinks? Just like Pop does. (If you've only noticed the click, but not associated with blinking, try "look for click" "x noise" etc.) 3. "Dad" is actually a simulacrum of your father that the aliens constructed ten years ago. He is completely unaware that he is a machine. 4. You still need to try and convince your dad that the aliens have been lying to him. If you show him the articles from the library, that will help put him off-balance. The final push over the edge will come from the metal cylinder in the bedroom. Q: So what's the deal with the cylinder in the bedroom? 1. Have you asked your dad about it? 2. If so, did you type the code he told you into the pad and looked through the window? 3. It looks like they're building a simulacrum of you in there. 4. If you ask your dad about it again, he'll still shoo you away, since he feels confident that he knows what's going on. If you've shown him the articles from the library, though, your story of a simulacrum in the cylinder will seem more plausible: he'll go check it out. Q: When I asked Dad about the cylinder the first time, it says he tweaks one of the wires on my head! I don't have wires on my head, do I? 1. If you "examine scalp" or "touch head", etc., you'll find that you do, in fact, have wires coming out of your head. Those wires are transmitting your brain activity to your simulacrum. (That's what is causing all of those tingling sensations on your scalp as well.) Q: What about Pop? 1. Pop is an obvious simulacrum, who is willing to give you information about the aliens. Of course, his information will be skewed by what the aliens want you to know. 2. Pop will also give you a brand new hoe once you give him a broken hoe and the crystal duck. Q: What's the deal with the library? 1. If you ask Pop about it, you'll find out that your dad has never gone in the library. Therefore, the aliens never bothered to create a simulation of the inside of it. 2. If you ask your dad about it, he will remember the inside of the library, which will then be partially implemented by the aliens. It will at least give you a toehold when you try to go inside. 3. Once you get inside, examine the desk three times. The first two will flesh out the library from your memories, and the third will make the news articles appear on the desk. Q: Dad is muttering something about an axe. What's that all about? 1. The simulacrum of your father is a good enough simulation to essentially be your father. You have just forced it to realize that your mother left him, despite her explicit promise not to. Just as your real father chopped down that tree with their initials on it ten years ago, the simulacrum wants to do the same. You need to supply him with the real axe. 2. To get the axe, you need to first set off the spring arm without hurting yourself. Get the clod of dirt out of the garden with the real hoe. (You can "hoe garden", "pry clod", whatever.) Put the dirt into the cylinder, which will set off the arm. Then pry the axe with the real hoe. Q: The tree just disappeared! What's that metal tower inside of it? 1. When the aliens made the simulacrum of your father, they put the field transmitters (the generators for the simulation you are in) in the safest places they could think of-- for instance, the tree that your father nurtured. Unfortunately for them, what used to be a safe place is no longer. Your dad is now about to put a serious crimp in their research if he takes that transmitter out. 2. Since that alien is clearly going to stop your father, you need to stop the alien. Attack it with something (such as the hoe). Q: Great, now I'm being dragged to the asylum, what happens now? 1. Well, now we have to question whether we were actually abducted by aliens, or whether our entire psyche has gone out the window. Fortunately, there's a clue in the descriptions: at one point the scene becomes blurry, but you feel that tingling down your scalp, and it clears up again. 2. That tingling on your scalp means that the aliens are still pulling information from your brain-- information about what the asylum looks like probably. You've already taken out one transmitter, perhaps you can mess them up further by pulling one of the wires out of your head. Q: Now I'm back in the clearing, but what really happened? 1. If you pick up the new pictures that you took of the ship, you'll see that there is no ship in them. If you examine yourself, there is no trace of the wires, although it seems like you've pulled out a clump of your own hair. The bruise is still on your arm, so you must have done *something* last night, but the question is, what? 2. At this point, there is no right answer. It's conceivable that you are going insane, and lived through an elaborate hallucination last night. It's also possible that everything you just did actually happened the way you perceived it, and the aliens are just extremely good at covering their own tracks. What do you think?