Lonesome Villageis a unique puzzle-solver that mixes and matches between a variety of different gaming genres, including social elements, life simulation, andwholesomeaction-adventure. Set in the sweet little town of Ubhora, Wes the coyote arrives just in time to save the villagers from an onerous power of great evil.
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Playing as this curious traveler with a secret past and an overwhelming desire to help, you meet a ton ofcute characterswho send you on side quests across the town, or provide you with magical items to help you along your journey. The best thing about Lonesome Village, however, is its diverse set of creative puzzle challenges that tease the mind in every which way.
10Big Bear
Unlike other puzzles, where your main job is to move your character through pre-defined pathways to avoid obstacles and collect loot, the Big Bear challenge gives you no control over your character, but rather the environment around it.
In this challenge, your character segues between different barriers in a segmented maze, rebounding when its path is blocked, and moving along if the path is clear. What you can control is the lever separating each segment from the next, flipping the lever to open up a pathway or close it up.
9Cat Eyes
The Cat Eyes challenge similarly lets you change how different elements of your environment interact with each other. Using oversized mirrors, which you may very slowly push around the tower dungeon, you reflect a laser beam through the adjoining rooms to shine through the central room.
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Once you have your mirrors set in the proper locations to triangulate your laser beam into the central room, you use two more mirrors there to shine them into the cat’s eyes for your key item. And the best thing about it is that the lasers also reflect on some of the walls, but there is no way to intuit that through the room design. You have to find that out through sheer trial and error.
8Hippo Bath
The beauty of Hippo Bath is not in its puzzle design, or daunting skill level, but rather in its higher meaning. In this challenge, you sail across an underground river in a small boat, trying your best not to hit any obstacles on the way. Sounds easy enough, until you learn that you may’t stop or slow the boat, only steer it.
If you’re not careful, this seemingly short trip can also last forever, because every obstacle you hit sends you back to the very beginning. All in all, Hippo Bath is a welcome reprieve near the middle of the game, allowing you to relax and catch a breather as you sail around after cracking a number of increasingly demanding puzzles within the prison tower and across the town.
7Magic Owl
Magic Owl is special in that it is a two-in-one puzzle. Not only do you have to match the different statues to their proper locations, you also need to make sure the light rays converge to form a matching third color on the wall. This requires a lot of iteration, pushing statues around and then doubling down on your strategy to get them in at the right order. Otherwise, you will find yourself stuck at one side of the room, having to reset the puzzle and start over.
As the final puzzle at the topmost floor of the prison tower, Magic Owl goes to prove thatnot everything is what it seems, putting the cherry on top of a beautiful, multi-layered story whose biggest twists and lessons are told visually rather than through narrative.
6Panda’s Wish
Panda’s Wish combines control of character with control of environment, putting you in a dungeon with a changing staircase. Your goal is to pull the right lever that will produce a staircase to help you make your way across the room and up to your destination at the topmost right of the dungeon.
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Adding a bit of intrigue, the lever you pull may change more than one staircase or bridge at a time, but it will always be one within your line of vision. This helps you visualize your way across the maze as you pull levers to build it yourself.
5Xolo Life
As with every tower challenge throughout Lonesome Village, the puzzle represents the nature and essence of its trapped owner. In Xolo Life, you simulate how bats define their location in space through sound, pushing around a set of speakers to direct sound waves in a specific direction. Having rearranged the speakers so the sound waves hit the giant bat ears on either side of the door, it swings open, leading you to your prized item.
By the time you make it to Xolo Life in-game, you also start to realize that you’re not just saving the villagers, you’re getting to know them.
4Turtle Age
Although Turtle Age is not one of the harder challenges, it is not immediately discernible. To solve it, you need to explore the room, move an element resembling a Rubik’s cube around to figure out how its colors are set in, and then figure out that you need to flip it on top of a button on the floor in an exact number of moves so the right color is facing upwards.
This seemingly normal challenge goes to release a very special character, Hanzo the village elder,a wise old turtlewith a big old heart who has sacrificed much to uncover the secrets of the evil that befell the town, and will sacrifice even more to save Wes from grave danger.
3Phoenix Feather
The Phoenix Feather is your first real side quest across the town. In an attempt to make it to the next tower floor, the temple demands a rare offering: the legendary Phoenix Feather. To get to it, you need to cross a swamp and go through a mountainous waterfall. Bad news — the waterfall is blocked, and the swamp bridge is in shambles.
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This sets you across a number of small errands around the village to acquire the necessary items to unblock the waterfall and fix the bridge, meeting a lot of interesting characters along the way.
2Star Puzzle
Although you managed to save all the villagers from the prison tower, your journey is still not over, as you run into Ezra trying to defeat evil at the central fountain with the power of a magical fallen star. The evil, however, is far too great, and the star is immediately shattered into four pieces, three of which are flung to different ends of the town: the Mountain, Beach, and Jungle.
Your mission is to travel across the town once more to fetch the star pieces, insert them into the star platforms scattered across town, and solve the puzzles inside. Ezra then uses the final star fragment to finish the job, and Wes receives a vital magical item in return: the golden magnifying glass.
1Boss Fight
Having saved every villager and defeated every evil, Wes now has to face his own past, and fight his own father — who turned out to be one of the cult leaders holding them hostage — to save the town once and for all.
In the series of puzzles that ensue, you use your knowledge of the previous puzzles and the magical items gifted by your friends to defeat him in a battle of skill, wits, and sheer courage to press on.
