Comments on: Room 3

By: britzerland

britzerland — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:26:40 +0000

3 new answers

1.
The sign under STOP might be BUS STOP. Its reversed to say SUB POTS. The prefix sub- means underneath. Since there are multiple stops signs we get STOPS.
STOPS reverses to SPOTS.
Count the spots in the text (full stop, exclamation mark, comma) and there are 18, the correct door.

2.
PANS reverse to SPAN. A span in biblical terms is “a small unit of length equal to the distance from the thumb to the little finger on a stretched hand, typically nine inches”
The stickman shows stretched out fingers and thumbs on two hands. 9 inches twice is 18.

3.
> People in their situation, confronted with a challenge, tend to accept the terms of the challenge as a given, without examining it from all sides.
You get 8 from situ8tion and 10 from TENd to make 18.
“As a given,” is giving the comma to look for, and “examine all sides” means to look at words each side of comma. ConFRONTed means word in front of comma. tEND means word after comma (which itself and gives TENd. Great use of just 4 characters here)

By: vewatkin

vewatkin — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:34:14 +0000

I don”t recall hearing that before, certainly worth mentioning.

By: ritz

ritz — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 07:31:14 +0000

may be easy enough to find as to have been mentioned before, and may be silly enough to be not worth mentioning, but STOP can be trimmed to TOP and WHAT to HAT. may be strengthened a teeny bit by the order being correct when flipped, and nothing in between being the same orientation

By: davidws

davidws — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:43:41 +0000

I agree vewatkins that for these speculations to be worth considering we require more evidence – so here goes. First I’d like to say that I think using the riddle of the sphinx to identify stick man as a sign for mankind is the best identity found so far for the top hat character, and that it is better that it be a more recent more powerful stage of mankind than the Ancient Greeks, hence the top hat and no Greek attire. Not necessarily all of mankind, but a type or role mankind takes on. As you’ve pointed out in the interconnectivity page posts, he can be helpful in this loop area to find our way out: Rooms 7 and 16 and this room. But then the trail kind of goes dry until Room 10 where he appears as a dancer next to door 14, a position similar to our stick figure in Room 3 next to door 18. In Room 18 we get the text “Shadows danced across the floor to the fire’s music. Someone’s lost his hat.” These lines connect light and shadow to dancing and the top hat figure. Just as in the myth of Icarus we don’t want bright light and we don’t want total darkness, we want a balance or a middle path. That doesn’t mean that top hat man is Icarus, just that the guidance for how to make choices that the myth provides (moderation and not extremes) is generally actionable as wisdom for mankind that top hat man didn’t follow – but perhaps we could for the rest of our way out provided we see the lesson. There is a kind of shadow path from door 3 to door 13 in Room 18 for example, and music to dance to. The other rooms I’ll leave for later because I want to get to the stop sign and what it’s hiding. For the stop sign, I think there’s likely a connection to Room 22 where there is a hidden stop sign under the ottoman in the room’s center. Room 22 has lots of astrological signs and Room 3 includes the question “what is your sign?” The sphinx has the lion’s body being Leo and the woman’s front being Virgo — two adjacent astrological signs. Finally, that sphinx tail sure looks like that tail in Room 22! Through a sort of symmetry argument, maybe the sign that the stop sign is hiding could have some relevance here and/or elsewhere. It is at least inviting me to speculate and infer what I could make it say if there’s enough evidence that’s discoverable – a good enough story around it. Then maybe we can really make it “our sign”. Tie the u-turn sign and the revealed Icarus moderation advice to the dancing top hat man and you get the following directions for Room 10 on the way out. In Room 10, door 34 is the darkest and door 14 is the brightest, the best door is the in-between door 41. Furthermore, Room 14 is very dangerous and the only safe move is a u-turn! All that is a lot of pieces to put together for an extra layer of solutions that aren’t strictly necessary, but it seams to fit well and kind of satisfying how it weaves in some details, or maybe ties various simpler solutions into a more cohesive tale. I see potential for more to Top Hat’s story that I think I’ll flesh out further in a post in the interconnectivity page. Hope that isn’t too tall of a tale for you vewatkins! If it is – I get it. I appreciate you warning us from straying too far afield which is all too easy to do. Especially at this point with all of the amazing solutions already posted.

By: vewatkin

vewatkin — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:22:18 +0000

There’s just no way or reason to interpret the unseen sign as saying “U Turn.” You could just imagine that it does, but you might as well skip some steps and just imagine it says “18″ on it. That sounds like a joke, but it’s truly no less arbitrary.

Moreover, we don’t need this imagined instruction to be motivated to think about mirror-imaging or rotation. Those concepts are inherent to the flipped and rotated elements in the room.

The stick figure does not resemble Icarus from any orientation. It’s also wearing a conspicuous top hat, a fashion choice incompatible with ancient Greece/Crete.

By: davidws

davidws — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:57:57 +0000

Thanks Kiki for the post. Hopefully this post helps clarify my thoughts. Following what others have posted before, to read the “This Way” sign correctly you can (1) turn the book upside down and then (2) turn the page over to look at the room through the next page (it helps to hold it up to a light) or (2) look at it in a mirror. The first step turns the 81 into an 18 and either second step turns the 18 back into an 81. In that final orientation the numbers in the signs add up correctly: 15 + 15 + 51 = 81. But two steps aren’t necessary to get there. The same thing can be accomplished in just one flip of the book about the top or bottom edge of the page. So maybe that one flip could be suggested by a u-turn sign. If it is a u-turn sign, I’m not sure it has to also work for the immediate door choice too (although I see how that could be confusing a bit like how that stop sign is confusing), but it could work as a hint to make your way back to Room 1. Also, we don’t really need to flip and turn anything to see that the “This Way” sign always points to Room 18. But if we do, we get to see that stick figure top hat man turn momentarily into Icarus, which might come in handy :) elsewhere. This post is getting long, so I’m going to try and post about Icarus later, perhaps in the interconnectivity section of this site since that top hat fellow shows up in a lot of places. His story I’m still working on so I’ll go and read the posts there and see what I can come up with…

By: Kiki

Kiki — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:32:53 +0000

Note that the book reads 81 when right-side-up and 18 when upside down. Also, why would we want to follow Icarus anywhere?

29 already instructs the reader to flip the book over, and that message gets across much clearer than this.

A U-Turn sign for “what is your sign” isn’t a bad idea… but I’ve only ever seen one sign specifically indicating a U-Turn. Mostly I’ve seen No U-Turn signs. I’d like to come up with a way this applies, but all the doors from 3 are two-way.

By: davidws

davidws — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 16:01:01 +0000

Perhaps the hidden sign behind the stop sign is a U(You)-Turn sign as a reply to the question “what is your sign?” and reinforced by their feeling “all turned around”. That could also make sense as an instruction to flip the book over backward to see the “this way” sign read correctly pointing toward door 18, which reads in this orientation as door 81 = 51 + 15 + 15 using the numbers in the sign texts. Also from that orientation the stick man looks like a falling Icarus too close to the sun. Icarus was instructed by his father Daedalus also to not fly too close to water as shown in the 2 pots and the pan. Perhaps we should try the pan’s handle and Icarus as he falls to his demise in Room 18 down that “long flight of stairs, through some sort of pantry…”

By: P.Bird

P.Bird — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 11:54:21 +0000

I did notice you’ve been stalking the halls of the Labyrinth for a decade now. It’d be weird if you didn’t experience a lunatic phase in all that time :P

By: vewatkin

vewatkin — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 11:48:44 +0000

Well, don’t let me ruin your fun. I try to provide some feedback here so that people aren’t misled as to the authenticity of these solutions. (I was, for quite a while, which is why my own lunacy is in evidence everywhere.)