Tormented Souls – Puzzle Key Hints (with Spoilers)

Key got you confused? It confused me as well. Here’s some light-to-heavy hints (bigger hints spoiler-tagged) to help you understand it.

Tips to Puzzle Keys

Understanding the Key

Once you’ve assembled the key (which means combining it with another item, if you haven’t done that, this guide isn’t for you yet!) then you’re going to want to understand how to use it.

There’s one simple rule that can be easy to forget despite being obvious: The shapes on the key are always relevant!

The hints are always direct references to what you need to do to understand using the key in each puzzle. Don’t ignore either. Again, obvious, but it can be easy to get lost in some random theory you have. Your goal is to understand how the shapes on above the keyhole, the hint, and the shapes all intertwine. Your solution should come naturally once you make the connection.

Anyway, I made this guide because I seriously couldn’t figure out any of the key’s solutions except the Pharaoh one. Upon typing up a forum post asking for some spoiler-free help, I actually thought about it enough to come up with a solution to one of the other puzzles without any help from anyone, which then helped me understand the key better and helped me solve the other 3 puzzles fairly quickly. I hope to provide something similar to that with this simple guide.

Alien/Pharaoh/Bee Puzzle

Probably the simplest and easiest to understand of the puzzles. Hints get progressively more obvious the further down you go into the guide.

The hint is an image of a pair of humans and the Earth, with an arrow pointing from the Earth to the humans. A very big hint.

What might be related through the images above the keyhole and the images on your key? And how does the hint play into it?

Humans come from Earth.

So… where do the things in the images above the keyhole come from?

Examine your key’s shapes and think about it.

Pharaohs come from Egypt.

Aliens come from space.

• Solution for Pharaoh: How might a Pyramid be relevant to a Pharaoh?
• Solution for Alien: There sure are a lot of Stars in Space.
• Solution for Bee: Bees come from Hexagons.

Sideways Numbers Puzzle

This one gave me a good “A-ha!” moment. I hope it will for you as well.

This comes with an “I-1” hint, don’t forget it! The rotated numbers are relevant, don’t forget them!

Hints get more obvious the further down you check spoilers, so if you’re interested in solving on your own with minimal help, don’t check all of them at once!

How might a single line be relevant to the shapes on your key?

Of course, shapes are comprised of lines, seems easy enough.

Wait, the solution isn’t working? But you thought you entered it right… Could it be the rotation element is throwing you for a loop? Maybe check the numbers again and see what the rotation might mean.

Why is only one number not rotated?

Oh crap it is rotated!

Solution: That’s not an 8! That’s the symbol for infinity! Only a single shape could possibly represent infinite in this scenario: And that shape is O!

Tetris Puzzle

The easiest puzzle to solve once you have a firm understanding of the key, possibly the easiest to solve outright if you’re not me.

Hints get progressively more obvious the further down you go.

The hint here is an image of a game of Tetris being played.

No, the game being played itself isn’t relevant, but the concept of Tetris is.

Pay close attention to the symbols above the keyhole. They’re not as random or as abstract as you might think.

How could you connect the shapes on the door to the symbols on your key in a logical way that involves Tetris?

Solution: Easy. Fill in the negative space of the shapes on the door with the shapes on your key. The top one has room for a square. The middle has room for a triangle. I think you can figure out the last one.

Broken Vase Puzzle

Personally I think this one’s the most clever. A relatively simple solution so long as you understand what the puzzle is conveying.

The hint is a broken vase being restored, and the symbols are geometric shapes, some in pairs, some not.

As always, the further down you go, the more obvious the hints.

This one’s a little hard to give hints on without spoiling, but I’ll try! For starters, sides are once again important.

The vase is broken. How might one restore a broken vase?

There’s nothing special about the third symbol. It is solved just like the other two. A bit of a red herring perhaps?

One way to fix a broken vase is with glue.

The number of sides of each shape is important.

But simply adding up the number of each shape’s sides doesn’t present a solution.

And that’s because you need to fix the vase.

After you glue two pieces together, clearly that forms a new shape, right?

A new shape means a new amount of sides…

Solution for the top symbol only: Because you might understand the puzzle but could be incorrectly inputting this one, the answer for the top symbol is 4, not 3. While it does form a triangle, it still counts both bottom pieces as a separate “side.” Bit unintuitive despite 4 being my first answer anyway. It was only in coming to make this guide that I realized some people might not take the line separating these as a divider and would just see the bigger triangle, which I think would be the actual correct solution. More on this below once you solve the puzzle or need more help.

Solution: Where the two shapes touch is where you subtract a side from each, as you’re gluing them together. So the twin triangles go from 6 sides to 4. I gave this one as an example because frankly it forms a bigger triangle and I think it should be 3 sides, which I imagine could throw a lot of people off.