Dædalian Depths

It probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone here that I'm an all-work-and-no-play kind of person. (It's a long story.) Now that I'm off work and have some breathing room, I'm trying to be a little more playful and spend a little more time doing things just for the fun of it. One of the things I've always liked is puzzles, and so I've been checking out puzzle books lately.

Perhaps the most famous of these is Christopher Manson's Maze, which I played years and years ago. Each page of the book has labelled doors leading to other pages in the book. It asks two questions: first, what is the shortest path from the entrance to the center of the maze and back out; second, what is the answer to the riddle in the center of the maze? Each room has puzzles of its own which tell you which way to go, but since I'm a computer scientist, I solved it using graph exploration algorithms (which I did by hand, as it's not a very large graph). Alas, the riddle at the center of the maze was so convoluted that it was basically unsolveable. Even so, it's a charming book and a pleasant way to spend an afternoon or two.

I recently discovered that somebody else—Rami Hansenne—has created a spiritual sequel of sorts, called Dædalian Depths. It's very similar in that it asks one to navigate the maze and then answer the puzzle at the end. I just finished it this afternoon: I think the writing and illustration is poorer than Maze, but the puzzles were composed fairly well and I enjoyed myself.

It seems that, once upon a time, the internet offered hints and solutions for the game, so one could check their work; as the internet rapidly disintegrates, however, these seem to be lost. (The game is only a few years old, too!) I'm posting the solution to the two puzzles here, mostly for my own future reference, but also in case anybody else comes across this page and wants to double-check their work. The solutions are each in a cut and encoded using ROT47 in order to avoid spoilers.

Puzzle 1: What is the shortest path through the maze?

`\mc\m`_\mb\mg\md\ma\m`d\m`c\m`f\ma_\mag\mac\m`h\mae\ma`\mcb\mc_\mbe\mcc\mcd\mb`\mbf\mbc\mca

Puzzle 2: How to unlock the door at the end?

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