Aww man for a moment I was all excited. The Room 3 isn’t out yet 
One and Two were, imo, the best things to ever appear on the iPad.
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It will be soon, better reasonably bug free than early.
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That struck me too; a heavy metallic ball with rotating rings and a link to ISIS? Maybe, I thought, they are trying to kill our best and brightest with the most fiendish to open letter bomb.
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Say it three times and a spook little girl appears behind you…
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…bearing an open Isis puzzle filled with green pea guacamole…
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If you knew the guy behind it you’d know just how diabolical, it was the same behind the scenes too. The business practice was (and I assume still is since the company Sonic Warp closed with investors losing everything, a new one being started as Sonic Games UK Ltd and mysteriously all intellectual property is still being used without ever being sold and bought):
- Contract designers and engineers (usually unemployed/desperate and unable to do anything about being ripped off)
- Get them to do all the work (also helps to promise them royalties on their designs too)
- Get to stage of manufacturing and sales. (stringing along with excuses about cashflow etc and bigger future promises).
- Don’t pay them
- Take credit as having designed yourself.
- Onto next product and step 1.
So that’s the kind of person you’re dealing with is it any wonder he treats customers in the same way by trying to squeeze as much out of them as possible.
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That’s a very pretty white and gold ball.
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I’m not going to argue about the business practicies and the rest of it, but there is nothing inherently wrong with the principle behind the puzzle if you think of it from the perspective of, say, bomb disposal. The idea of a puzzle with apparent features that are not part of the solution is nothing new. It’s like burglar alarms with extra wires, circuits that need to be closed before another one is opened, and so on. They are not designed to be easy.
The question is whether the puzzle could be solved at all by an intellectual process and by testing. Can the magnets be detected from outside (most phones nowadays contain a sensitive magnetometer)? Can the balls be heard rattling? I guess a skilled safe cracker would listen to the outer rings clicking and decide that there is no functionality because there are no other noises when they turn.
I’m not saying this isn’t a rip off, but I am suggesting that a solvable puzzle could be designed on the principles of misdirection, non-functioning features and so on, and in which a unique serial number might be a clue rather than simple misdirection. It’s just that this isn’t it.
[edit - looks like someone has been exercising their right to be forgotten on Google. Of course it may not be Mr. Reeves. But googling for Andrew Reeves ISIS is instructive.]
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I get the joke – you are riffing on Mallory Archer’s for-contract spy agency, aren’t you? ODIN was far superior, at least until Trexler’s unfortunate accident – which was Mallory’s agency’s fault, BTW.
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It reminds me of that “riddle” about the sailor who eats albatross in a restaurant and bursts into tears. You’re supposed to explain why, but the “why” is a convoluted backstory about cannibalism while stranded on a desert island that you have no way of intuiting from the “riddle” as given. You basically just make up a story about why he’s crying.
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At least this Isis adventure is guaranteed not to end in extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation.
I own the first four puzzles in the set (which I have solved), and I agree with the issues the OP experienced. I purchased my copies not because I had any interest in the “adventure” component (which, by the way, is a sweepstakes – more on that later), but because I’m a security engineer interested in breaking these kinds of puzzles. This post will liberally contain spoilers after this point.
First, Isis puzzles are only successful as metapuzzles. Each one features a hidden mechanism – always based on a tumbler lock design, using ball bearings, rods, or rings to manipulate the pin position – required to solve the puzzle. Most have YouTube solutions that sketch out what you’re trying to do, but their internal mazes vary by the mold used by their supplier (in the US, Smith and Wesson, who has different molds than their UK manufacturer). Many contain manufacturing defects: the company is fortunately very responsive if you experience these (I did on the Isis I and the Copernisis, for example).
With this information, you should freely skip the website unless you intend to read its forums, which contain most of the information you need to solve the puzzles. You can find most of these outside of its paywall using Google.
The puzzles only work if you spoil yourself first. If you follow the instructions, as I did for the Isis IV (Tesserisis and included Tarka), there are very few logical conclusions: individual puzzle solutions are a matter of trial and error over the course of about a day or two of fiddling with the puzzle, or buying two and cleaving one of them in half with an arc welder to figure out its internals (which I have not done, but appears to be the optimal solution to the Isis V sweepstakes yet to occur, which is disappointing).
That all said, when you get one open for the first time, it’s very rewarding. Each has a hidden compartment that ejects a key, which is one of the game’s better design decisions in my opinion. Having a physical reward for your trouble is rather nice, and I still keep the four keys I obtained attached to my keychain.
Do not otherwise bother with the adventure component. The adventure is a subscription service, and its early solutions are hidden information puzzles rooted in trivia from the travels of the game designer. You are typically given a phrase that maps to a physical feature of a location, and must extrapolate from it via Google. One I worked on, for example, was based on the clock adjacent to the store housing the pyramid with a token $500 prize. You won’t solve these unless you’re local to the region, and each “try” requires proximity to a physical store or paid “password tokens” at about $2 apiece, so be wary of that.
Later adventure puzzles (paired with the Copernisis and Tesserisis) are essentially online Flash games housed in a kludge of PHP. These have a limited number of tries enforced by a LAMP stack. I did not have the heart to solve them, as the insecurity and inattention to detail of their website did not give me a very good impression of their design. I was unwilling to craft exploits to learn more after reporting critical bugs to the founder. Disappointing.
In summary, if you invest in these puzzles, know that the most enjoyable aspect is solving their physical puzzles with spoilers. At that point, you’ve bought a very expensive, but very good fidget, and might want to consider other hidden information puzzle boxes that are cheaper. The Isis puzzles are physically very satisfying to hold and work with, and all four can be “reset”, so they still make excellent desk toys long after opening them.
My review is, thus: good construction, bad puzzle. I did the research ahead of time, so I knew what I was getting into. And I definitely can’t agree with the puzzle designer that these are the “hardest puzzles in the world,” as I know better from a technical perspective.
As mentioned, I also found many exploits and bugs along the way, some in the physical puzzles themselves. The Copernisis mechanism, for example, can be trivially picked by moving the rings in a specific pattern in reverse, which is not the intended solution. Store staff are also very untrained on the sweepstakes portion of these puzzles; I do not trust those to be robust to social engineering.
Thus, flawed puzzles at best. Viable if you want metal toys sturdy enough to stun an ox, but not a strong recommendation from me.
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Actually, those are the “paid for” clues 8 and 9…
Could be Holding Lice Road.
" “That serial number is already registered under a different email
address.” If there’s a benign explanation for that, I can’t think what
it could be."
Bad database design. Don’t know if that qualifies as “benign”, but at least it’s not actively malicious.
The description of the solution reminds me of the classic Old Man Murray article, “Who Killed Adventure Games?”, which describes the genre as “spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird’s nest.”
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Everything you mentioned makes sense once you realise this is essentially a one man operation who outsources all design work then dumps those people so they can’t improve on things. I know the guy that did the online games, he didn’t get paid so is it any wonder they weren’t properly implemented? Was probably handed over to yet another person who had no idea how to make them secure etc. Put it this way they had to hire people to reverse engineer the Isis puzzle after they fell out with the manufacturer to get new drawings for it. Most exploitative company I’ve ever had experience with. It irks me most that any money goes to them because it’s not going to the actual puzzle designers.
I want to put in context what people pay for these puzzles.
They typically are about 800-1000% markup (£5-10 to produce at most, at least back when I was there). Now you’re thinking they must have a lot of overheads…in my case I did about 8+ months work + travel/other expenses + promise of royalties on my puzzle (I didn’t work on Isis but I was asked for reverse engineering help on it), I took it from concept all the way through to full production. I got paid in the end £1000 total ($1500) and no royalties. When I tried to get what I was owed they cut all contact and presumably moved onto the next project. This is their business model (although since liquidated company and set it up as new one I’m sure it’s the same way today).
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Look. It happened once, ONCE. And lest we bother about the grape jelly on the wall or the signed copy of The Octopus that was lodged into the same space…well, let’s just not bother at all, mmkay?
As for unbreakable puzzles, and as a person generally not smart enough to figure out said puzzles (yeah, Rubik, I’m fucken lookin’ at you, pal), let me be the not-first to recommend one of the better “solution tools” on the market:
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“The clues turned out to be pretty useless,”… I just decrypted them and they seem pretty useful to what kind of puzzle it is. It isn’t a Rubik’s cube type puzzle, it’s a hidden ball maze puzzle, one that you have to solve by _listening to how the bearings move within the ball. It’s also not just a puzzle, it’s a contest where you can win a prize for opening it, like a $500 gold coin. It’s seems more like a treasure hunt game than a stand alone puzzle. So, maybe it’s not a puzzle for you, but it seems that others find it fun.
I’m not sure what all the ‘personal information’ you would be giving out? Name, Address, Email? Not really that personal, pretty sure they aren’t asking for SSN or children’s and pet’s names. They need this information to send you the manual (yes, it does seem that you need an up to date one, since the internal mazes change) and the one you used probably wasn’t for your puzzle so probably messed things up for you. Probably want to send you spam or offer other things for you to buy. Calling them extortionists is a bit hyperbolic… Hold on, I need to go check out this new cool gadget on the boingboing store…
@frauenfelder: It’s actually even worse than this review makes it seem.
This review said that there was nothing in the sphere when opened. I think that the defective sphere they received was better than the real sphere, because the actual “prize” would have made the reviewer’s hair stand on end.
From this solution video, when you unlock the sphere you get a physical key.
This key contains a code on it, which requires you to make an account on the website and pay for a subscription to go any further(!!!).
I’m glad I never solved the one I was given — it would have made me feel as dumb as I (deservedly) felt when, as an not-yet-wordly nine-year-old, I excitedly finished a puzzle in a logic puzzle book which offered “real prizes.” The prize could be redeemed by calling a pay-per-minute phone number, and waiting while it listed all the prizes. Since the first few prizes were worth hundreds of dollars, and since they seemed to be ordered arbitrarily, I stayed on the line, and, surprise-surprise, after I had put in about six dollars-worth in the bloody pay phone, my “prize” ended up being some subscription to a magazine or something.
Even as a nine-year-old it shamed me how I had been duped by such a stupid thing (from a logic book, no less), and had I bought and solved this (I did neither, it was given to me by an aunt) I would have felt just as shamed.
