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.
Non-bastardized version:

Oh that’s easier to read in me eyes
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
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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
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
Take a look on tunic, but it comes with some combat action, which may not be what you are looking for.
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.
You can turn that down and I highly recommend doing so.
I found the combat to be quite obnoxious.
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.
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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.
Thank you for the share. I will be back in three years time
What the heck man I have things to do today.
20 minutes. 2 minutes of elation. This is unethical to post without content warnings.
Ah, typo is short for typographical error. I’v never realized that before.
Those pesky lead pieces all look the same eh!
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.
Oh i see,
Its
solution
12
You add up the digits.
(7+2)+(9+9)=9+18=27
9+(4+5)=9+9=18
(1+8)+(3+9)=9+12=21
(2+1)+(3+6)=3+9=12
3+(2+8)=3+10=13
(1+3)+(2+1)=4+3=7
Yay
Plz fix spoiler tags
Looks like this for me?

Moved it down a line is it better?
It didn’t help but I appreciate you trying. I think this is the moment I realize Sync is so wildly unsupported that it can’t read spoiler tags. Sigh. That’s on me.
Ah, dang sorry for ruining it for you.
Being real, if this post hadn’t made it clear that the solution was non obvious, I likely would have given up before getting it, just because my chicken is being more interesting than usual.
But, knowing that there was a “trick” to it, meaning that it takes some lateral thinking, I didn’t take my usual approach to number puzzles, which means it only took one look at the upper left for the likely solution to be visible. Then it was just running down and testing with the rest, then plugging in for the solution.
No way in hell I would have had the patience for it when my baby bird is being a silly dinosaur without that front loading assumption the solution wouldn’t be evident with a systematic approach. Oh, I’d have given it maybe fifteen minutes, but with a fuzzy butt in play, that would have been it
you what? lol
No, I who. dehumanization no good
What? You’ve never been distracted by a chicken before?
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.
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.
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
How do we know if we’re right then?
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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.












