BasketMC

Slide Puzzle, Episode 2: Quern

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Episode 1 ended with a new tool in the inventory and no place found for it. This video starts with a likely spot, moves on when it does not work, and then settles in front of a frame of sliding wooden blocks in town. Nearly the whole episode goes into that one puzzle, and the block finally gets through in the last minute.

A socket on a door

The video opens at a stone door with a round recess and a dark, many-sided hole in its middle. The commentary calls it "a hexagon where I can attach the thing to" and tries the double-handled tool there. Nothing happens, and the tool can't be dragged into place. "So maybe this isn't where it goes."

A round recess set in a gray stone wall, with an empty dark many-sided hole at its center and grooves running out from it across the stone

Basket walks back through town and checks the door that wouldn't open, the door with the gear symbol, and the weights. None of them do anything new.

The frame turns over

Then comes "Oh wait, what's this? Aha! I found a thing." It is the frame of wooden blocks seen in town last episode, standing upright beside a building near a rope. The blocks can't be picked up, but the whole frame can be flipped. Once it lies flat, the blocks slide. "Okay, now I can actually just do a sliding puzzle."

Looking down into a wooden frame lying flat on a stand in sandy ground, iron bars running across a grid of pale wooden blocks of different lengths with a few empty dark gaps between them

Twenty minutes of stuck

The blocks come in different sizes, and that is the trouble. The goal, as the commentary puts it, is to get one block "past these two things which is tricky." Long blocks jam the gaps, and moves keep leading back to the start: "I feel like this is going back to where I was a second ago, it is."

At one point Basket tips the frame upright again to look at it, then lays it back down. From about the 15-minute mark a pointer shows over the frame, after the commentary asks whether the swinging view is making anyone feel sick, and hopes the change will make it "less queasy."

The puzzle keeps winning. "All puzzling, what a puzzling puzzle!" Later: "This is quite the interestingly difficult puzzle for how it seems like it shouldn't be that tough." The commentary asks the chat not to post spoilers, since the plan is to work it out alone.

Through at last

At about 22:30 the pieces line up. "Oh, this seems promising. Aha! There we go." The commentary admits, "I'm not really sure what I did there," and turns the frame.

The wooden block frame tipping up on its stand, its barred top showing rows of blocks and its plank side turning toward the viewer

Where it ends

The frame stands upright against the building again, with its blocks in new places. The commentary expects that "this door will come down." The view goes up toward a rope and a dark wooden structure, and the video fades out there, before anything is seen opening.

The block frame standing upright against a dark wooden wall, pale blocks arranged in its grid with a dark gap across the lower middle, a wooden bucket and a small stone block below it