Death's Door: Perplexing Puzzles

While I'm at it with all the Death's Door hype on Hyrule Blog, I want to reiterate on a small point of criticism I had with the game in my review, where I want to talk about two puzzles that really had me stuck for multiple hours during my first playthrough. Ultimately, I had to get a hint from the internet to finally be able to move on, where in one case I was missing something that I would have never even considered and in the other I simply couldn't solve the puzzle at the given time.

You should stop reading here if you don't want any spoilers on puzzles. Or you can keep reading if you don't want to fall into the same traps as I did...

 

Puzzling Pots

One of these puzzles was the pot constellation in the northwest corner of the Estate of the Urn Witch. You have 13 pots here arranged on something like a smaller chessboard. Once you break five of them, they will glow and be put together again.

It was pretty clear right away that you have to destroy five specific pots. Five out of thirteen already leads to thousands of possible variants, but the game also actually wants you to destroy the right five pots in the right order, so it's nearly impossible to accidentally find the solution simply by trying.

So, what to do here? Naturally, you would assume that there is a clue in the environment somewhere. It could be an inscription giving you a hint, or maybe the Pothead character is saying something about it. I was going as far as drawing the whole estate, keeping note of all the statues in case they were giving a clue here. But nothing.

This was driving me crazy, because I usually want to find things out myself, before I seek aid. For a while I even considered "simpler" solutions, like maybe I had to destroy all the pots at once. So, you can destroy up to four pots and then you will have to quickly do the rest. I managed to pull this off this eventually, but to no avail.

Problem was that the clue that I needed completely eluded me. And here is what you will have to do:

The game has a series of "shiny things" to collect, which all come with a 3D object and a description in a gallery. Some of them act as keys in the environment, but this happens automatically, so you never really had to pay any close attention to these objects and texts. I was going to study them eventually, once I've finished the game and maybe understand everything better. But it turned out that one of these objects had the solution to the above puzzle painted on it, which you can only see if you enlarge it while it's rotated to the back side... Ugh.

You can find this shiny object in the dungeon of this area, the Ceramic Manor, but it's easy to miss and was actually one of the last things for me to collect. But when I found it, I didn't pay close attention to it, because I never had to until now. I guess, this is still my fault for not reading, because the description clearly states that something was drawn on it, but it's not like I ever thought of studying these objects for clues to begin with. It's a really an unconventional puzzle for this game...

Flooded Fortress

This is not so much a puzzle, but about getting to an area that seems impossible to reach. When you first go through the swamps of the Flooded Fortress, you may spot some additional marks of land in the distance by shifting your camera.

This caught my attention after I got the Hookshot and assumed that I would be able to get everywhere in the game. The area has these switches that can make platforms appear and you can even see one of these switches over there, so it was definitely something that you're supposed to reach eventually.

The problem was to find an angle of getting over there and hitting the switch, where I was running all around the swamp to figure this out. But it felt like it couldn't be done and that's probably because it couldn't be done at the time, because you won't be able to get there until the postgame. And even then you will still be missing a key if you go there right away. I've wasted a lot of time investigating this for something that's super easy to figure out at the end of the game...

So, my best advice here is to ignore this entirely. This riddle will solve itself if you simply keep going.