You return to your consciousness.
You find yourself trapped in a room, facing a wall where all information is located. There is also a table, on it a permanent marker.
Before inspecting every piece of info, you focus on the door. You observe that on the door is a lock that needs a word of length eight letters.
You turn your attention to the leftmost part of the wall, and see a grid with all the letters of the English alphabet, with a few symbols for some reason.
To its right is another grid, with dots, numbers, and letters...
You then look at a third grid. This one is much larger, and is mainly occupying the center of the room.
You notice that there is a list of instructions below this large grid.
RULES IN NAVIGATION:
- You must start at the sun tile.
- Valid move directions are north, south, east, and west.
- In a move, you cannot deviate from the row or column you are currently in, depending on whether you move east/west or north/south, respectively. In other words, the move you make must be completely straight. For instance, if I am in a 3x3 tiled grid with columns 1, 2, and 3 from left to right and rows A, B, and C from top to bottom, and I am in tile 2A, and my move, which is southward, allows me to reach the bottom of the grid, then the only valid place I can end up on is tile 2C, and not tiles 1C or 3C.
- No backtracking. The direction of your (n+1)th move cannot be the reverse of the direction of your nth move. If I move eastward, my next move cannot be westward, and vice versa. If I move northward, my next move cannot be southward, and vice versa.
- Any tile can only be visited at most once. For instance, when the start of your move is at tile A and the end of it is at tile E, and tiles B, C, and D are between A and E, you can never visit A anymore, but you can still visit B, C, and D. If you move away from E, you cannot visit E anymore, and so on.
- A valid move also consists of not skipping over walls (tiles colored black).
Those are some lengthy guidelines. You look to the right of the large grid, and there an illustration is placed. It has some stars and... 4's and 2's?
You finally reach the rightmost part of the wall, and you see quite a number of notes.
The first notes you encounter are two similar-looking ones.
CCW S OI SJPF PDDM HW YP MFN*
CW N PAY WAX FIGHTS
The next note you see has a poem on it.
$ \\\rm{\textit{1's and O's}}\ \ $
I'm wondering where my life should go;
Direction, the next, I have not known.
Gaining hope, though, doubtless is worth doing;
Most of all, loving each other's assuring.
Yet another note after that:
Lydian x 2
And you read off the last note, having reached it:
c equals o, but in general
??? The hell could that mean? What do any of these mean?
You step back, having absorbed a lot of information. Your eyes dart back to the door lock, reminding you of your desire to escape. After all, even though you would love to be trapped in a room filled with puzzles, you wouldn't want to stay there for eternity, right?
...Right?
Suddenly, you hear a voice, which fills the whole room. "Though I am the one who trapped you," they say, "I will not hesitate to give you a hint every ~24 hours." ...Weird experience, but you're not complaining.
Hint 1.
You have finished solving the slitherlink puzzle. You see that there are words contained inside the loop. Involuntarily, you make a mental note of the number of letters, and... wait, have you seen this before...
Hint 2. (replaced)
NOTE: The previous Hint 2 was worded wrongly. In lieu of that, I shall be giving a new Hint 2. Greatly apologize for this.
Deusovi was on the right track about the "orientation and starting point".
Hint 3.
For the similar notes, which are encrypted, the first specification implies rotation.
The second specification is always the same for each (8n-7)th letter, where n is an integer greater than zero.
(...and don't forget the marker.)
Hint 4.
(Interesting to see that no one else has cracked this yet :D)
If nothing is specified, then by itself an encrypted letter or symbol has eight possible decryptions.
Hint 5.
Not surprisingly, the title of the poem is intentional.
Hint 6.
We shall now tie everything together.
Indeed, the poem works that way. But what would be the simplest way to parse such extracted information?
Moreover, one will hopefully realize that "C equals O, but in general" itself does not clue a letter, but rather narrows down options for one. For now, I choose not to put further details about that here and instead put them in the next hint.
Hint 7.
There is no ASCII nor alteration. There are four substeps to get from the poem itself to the letter, and Reinier has gotten the first one so far.
Hint 8.
I'm almost running out of hint ideas, but I will try my best not to xD
Echoing Hint 6, how else can one interpret binary?
Hint 9.
Jens has continued where Reinier got stuck. However, since Jens got stuck as well and is really close to getting the seventh letter, I will not hesitate to say that "SC" should remain written as "Sc"; hopefully it helps to retain the case.