Treasure Hunt Solution

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This perplexing map seems to have been made such that no average treasure hunter would stumble upon its bounty.

Each of the cryptic phrases reference two different hidden keywords. Decode each of these pairs and cross-reference them to claim its hidden prize, X marks the spot!

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For this puzzle, the player is presented with 5 riddles and is clued to see that each riddle has 2 separate answers. Each set of answers have the same amount of letters (shown by the blank spaces below each line), and each contains a red X on it.

Each of the key words is clued directly from an underlined section of its respective riddle. Though not obvious at first, the player quickly realizes once filling in a word that these X marks represent the place of an ‘X’ in the word.

For example, the two answers to the first riddle are boxes (“these cardboard packages”) and index (“these small cards”). Notice how the ‘x’ letters in these words align with the red X on the map when written in the blanks.

Continuing in this way, the player makes the following words:

BOXES INDEX

SPHINX TUXEDO

GALAXY EXPAND

HYPERTEXT DEXTEROUS

RELAX EXACT

The next step, as the flavortext alludes to, is to cross-reference these pairs of words, with X “marking the spot”. Here, this means using the ‘X’ (cross) in each word of the pair, to reference the letter in its position in the other word. Doing this for the first pair yields ‘D’ and ‘S’ as shown below:

Doing this for the remaining phrases will give the words DONUT and SHAPE spelled out in order.

BOXES INDEX

SPHINX TUXEDO

GALAXY EXPAND

HYPERTEXT DEXTEROUS

RELAX EXACT

The shape of a donut and the answer to this puzzle, is TORUS.

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