Tortoise Protocol

Juno’s sequential discovery puzzles are legendary! Latterly they’ve tended to come along pretty much annually. They’re hotly anticipated and tend to sell out in minutes – this year’s release of Tortoise Protocol didn’t disappoint on that front – it was literally gone in minutes with some folks probably ruing their decision to enable two-factor authentication on their purchases.

My copy made the trip over to the UK in great time and I was happily puzzling the following weekend. Tortoise Protocol is a chunky puzzle – it’s definitely more than a handful and all of the requisite tortoise-y bits are where you’d expect them to be. The shell seems to have a bit of wiggle relative to the body, so at some point we’re going to expect to be able to open things up… but at the start, we just have a few appendages to fiddle with to try and make some progress.

There are some obvious things to get the tortoise to do and some of them appear to open the doors to even more things, so we decide this must be progress and we forge on until we find ourself with fewer appendages and a whole new world opening up to us.

At this point (and it’s not really a spoiler!) you find yourself with all of the stuff you’ve done up until now out on display and easily accessible and another half of the story apparently totally locked up… sure there’s a lot of things to investigate and poke about with, just nothing actually seems to give you any progress at all…

I spent quite a while at this point in the solve pondering my life choices and wondering where the heck my inspiration would come from… there was obviously still a pile of things to do – just no apparent way in to start things off… this particular brick wall kept me at bay for ages.

Eventually I stumbled across the key to defeating my current nemesis that started a wonderful romp of a solve through the rest of the puzzle. There’s a wonderfully whimsical series of linked challenges to amuse the solver, with each giving just enough up to guide you through to the next challenge, be that a peek of something useful, or the discovery of a new tool. Given this is Juno, it’s worth keeping an open mind about things you come across – most things are tools in the right hands!

No tortoises harmed in this blog post

 

There are some fun steps along the way, and I found myself wondering how some things worked and where the heck some tools had magically appeared from.

There is a very clear end goal – you’ll know when you’ve found it!

And the best part? Resetting is wonderfully non-trivial – if you did miss anything along the way, you’ll be forced to work it out in order to reset everything… and there was one little “feature” I thought I hadn’t used until almost the very end of the reset – and I smiled to myself when I twigged why it was there – everything is there for a reason!

Juno’s sequential discovery fans are going to love this one and I suspect that if it ends up getting entered into any puzzle design competitions it’s going to give the other entries a damn good run for their money!

Another epic sequential discovery puzzle from one of the masters of the art!