Long-range gesture quick reference
Also searched as: sign language / hand signals / how do we talk without radios
- Players
- Everyone
- Time
- 5 minutes to read once
- Coordinates
- No fixed coordinate
- Reward
- Saves a large amount of time across a dozen later puzzles
The short answer
Voice stops working in a lot of places in this game: cut off by a room (orange barn, interrogation room), too far away (green seat), or actively muted by the room (the black tower's silent room). A set of gestures agreed in advance is the only channel that holds.
The conclusion: agree them before the first time you get separated. Inventing gestures on the spot is the single biggest reason the orange barn traps people.
Before you start
- Five minutes with the whole team reading this once is worth more than any single-puzzle guide
Step-by-step3 steps
- 1
Agree how numbering is counted first
Most failures are not a wrong gesture, they are an unaligned direction. Whether "the third one" counts from the left or the right - say it out loud first.
Faster:The form that works: "third from the left, round".
- 2
Split any message into three parts
Every piece of information splits into kind + position + count. Send one part at a time instead of trying to express a whole board in one movement.
Schematic: separated communication. One side can only look, the other can only act, and the channel between them is cut on purpose - orange barn, silent room, interrogation room and beach house all fit this model. - 3
Use repetition, not amplitude
From far away nobody can see detail, but everyone can see a count. Repeating one simple movement N times is far more reliable than performing one complex one.
Gesture cheat sheet
On this puzzle your voice does not matter. This set of agreements does.
| Signal | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Number of fingers = N | Number N (agree to count from the left first) |
| Open palm pushed forward, then held | Stop / do not press |
| Both hands making a triangle overhead | Triangle tile (=10, the beach house encoding) |
| Five fingers open, then a fist | Round / star |
| Arms crossed | Reversed / mirrored left and right |
| Hand drawing a circle | Start over / reset |
| Slap the partition N times | I am number N / position N |
| Point at yourself, then at the target | That one |
| Raise a lantern and keep it raised | Ready - press once I lower it |
Where it goes wrong
These are the questions real players search for most. Working through them in order usually finds the cause.
After finishing:——
Where this solution came from
This convention was put together by this site from what several puzzles need in common - orange barn, interrogation room, silent room, beach house tiles, and the lantern signals on the crane and beach tower - and there is a dedicated gesture manual on the Steam Community as a further reference.
Puzzles in this game are not assigned in a fixed order: most of them reward the same generic red gourd, so you can clear any set of challenges around a tower. That is why two guides list different puzzle line-ups for the same tower — neither is wrong. Unless a coordinate is credited to a named source it is a community measurement, and later versions can shift it; once you are in the area, trust the landmark over the number.