Ainigmata Ostraka are a type of collectible in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and are very similar in practice to the Papyrus Puzzles from Assassin’s Creed Origins. Each one contains a riddle on a stone tablet which, when solved, unlocks a new engraving.
Here on this page, we’ll provide you with a full list of all the Ainigmata Ostraka locations, and, of course, how to solve every puzzle to unlock all the engravings.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Ainigmata Ostraka explained – puzzle rewards, bonuses and more
Throughout the Ancient Greek world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you’ll come across special collectibles written on stone tablets. These contain a riddle which will lead you to a different location in the same region/island. Solving the riddle will unlock an engraving, which can be added to a piece of armour or weapon to enhance its stats. You’ll need to visit a Blacksmith to apply them.
There are no telltale sound effects or visual cues to make each one stand out. The only element that defines them from the environment around them is a marker that lets you interact once you’re close enough to a respective spot. So they’re really easy to miss!
It is possible to locate all the Ostraka early on, but since all of these items are linked to specific locations – such as hideouts, camps, caves and Leader Houses – there’s a good chance you’ll have to face high-level enemies so it’s a good idea to pick them up along the way or clear the story first so you’re suitably levelled up. Some of the riddles can get really tricky, but don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. Happy hunting!
Rewards and bonuses, and other things to know about Ainigmata Ostraka
There’s really one other key thing to know about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Ainigmata Ostraka, and that’s how their rewards work.
Solving the riddle and finding the hidden treasure of an Ainigmata Ostraka gives you a special Engraving – but contrary to what we originally expected these aren’t set in stone. Instead, there are several set types of Engraving (say, one that gives a percentage increase in Crit Chance on full health), and each time you find an Engraving of that type, its bonus increases.
So, for example, the ostraka called ‘The Floor is Lava’ and ‘Pigsty’ both give you Engravings that increase damage with heavy weapons when solved, but it doesn’t matter what order you solve them in – the first will always increase it by 2%, the second by 4%, up to the fifth, increasing it by 10%.
For reference, here’s a rundown of all the Ainigmata Ostraka according to the Engraving bonus they grant you as a reward, and amount they increase by for each one you solve – but remember, it doesn’t matter what order you do them in!
The easiest Ainigmata Ostraka secrets to find in Ancient Greece:
If you’re out for a few quick hit or just some digestible puzzles to help ease you into the process of hunting them all down, here are some of the easier ones we found:
Hound Docked – Found on a moored ship in the Occupied Forest of Tripodiskos on Megaris.
A Finger Tip – Look for a giant statue led on its back in the Valley of the Snake in Phokis.
Procrastinate Now – Look for the arch-like Portara on Naxos to grab this secret.
Showboat – Head to Patrai and look for a theatre with a boat as its stage in Achaia.
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Sekiro: Shadow’s Die Twice is tough as nails – perhaps From Software’s toughest game to date – requiring some genuine skill and a real shake-up of the tried-and-tested methods you might have used in the Soulsborne games gone by.
Our Sekiro walkthrough and this Sekiro guide hub are here to help though: below we’ll gather each individual guide page we have for the game plus every step of our (currently in-progress) walkthrough, including a Sekiro boss guide and boss list taking you through bosses, mini bosses and any key moments in between.
Sekiro walkthrough – our Sekiro boss guide and boss list
Our walkthrough is still very much in progress for now, as are our standalone guides to the game’s various mechanics – keep checking back for more in the days following launch, but for now here are they key pages we’ve got for you so far:
Sekiro boss list and walkthrough – Ashina Outskirts
Sekiro guide hub – all our Sekiro guides in one place
Like our walkthrough above, our list of Sekiro guides is still growing, and you’ll see plenty more pages spring up here over the coming days and weeks.
Sekiro boss battle advice: key things to know about how to get through Sekiro: Shadow’s Die Twice’s bosses
Our walkthrough above focuses primarily on boss and mini boss fights, and so most of the time it’s all about combat.
With that in mind, here are a handful of key things to know, or just generally bear in mind, when you’re diving into boss fights or working your way through the game. Combine these tips with the specifics we run through in each of our boss pages above, and you’ll be off to a flyer.
You’ll need to get used to a variety of unblockable attacks and their counters if you want to succeed.
Sekiro boss fight pointers
Bank the next Skill Point – If you know you’re in for a boss or mini boss fight, and there’s a Sculptor’s Idol nearby, it’s worth grinding out a few grunts until you reach the next Skill Point. You lose all your progress to the next point each time you die, so don’t risk all that XP and just get the last few kills to tick yourself over before you take the next big bad on.
Top up on Pellets – There’s a vendor fairly early on, shortly after the second mini boss General Naomori Kawarada (on the far left of the next area, listen for the crow sounds to guide you to him). Use vendors when you see them and don’t be afraid to fast travel back to them before boss fights to top up. A handful of Pellets can make the difference, and that Sen’s got to be spent on something!
Invest your Sen in Light Coin Purses – That said, if you have a load of Sen burnig a hole in your pocket then if you’re not spending it on items, buy Light Coin Purses with it from a vendor. It sounds silly, but these can be ‘activated’ when you need them, and store Sen safely – you don’t lose Light Coin Purses on death, but you do lose half your Sen.
Be more agressive than you’re used to – We cover this more in our Sekiro combat systemguide, but it feels uncomfortable being aggressive in a game that’s so punishing of your mistakes, but it’s necessary. Know your rock-paper-scissors matchups for Perilous Attacks and how to counter them, get a read on your enemy’s roster of attacks and prepare yourself mentally to attack, dodge, jump, and deflect at the right times. There’ll be few major fights where you won’t need to do all of these at some point.
Practice, practice, practice – Don’t ignore that friendly training zombie near the Dilapidated Temple. Every time your learn a new skill or make some significant progress, take the time to visit him and practice it. Set yourself a rule, like “don’t leave until you can finish every new training excercise without taking damage”, and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes to your combat throughout the game.
Use everything at your disposal, but don’t rely on it – You’ll find that a lot of bosses and general battles can be cheesed. Dousing enemies in Oil and then setting them on fire with a Prosthetic, for instance, or relying on the Firecracker Prosthetic to stun bosses and get some free hits in. These are all worth using, along with the items that are handed out along the way, but don’t rely on them. If you use them as a crutch, you’ll soon hit a boss that’s immune to them, and then without the time spent mastering the foundations of combat, you’ll really struggle.
Over 10 minutes of new Death Stranding footage closed out Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom livestream, with the usual mix of bizarre Hideo Kojima fare.
First, a character trailer for “Mama”, played by The Leftovers actress Margaret Qualley. In this, we discover Qualley’s character is “Mama” to a baby from “the other side”. It’s invisible, so you don’t see it breastfeeding through her clothes.
Next up, a trailer for “Bridge Baby” and “Dead Man”, the latter of which is the character played by Kojima pal Guillermo Del Toro. In this, there’s some heavy exposition for what the babies glimpsed in the game are used for – although after the clip played, Kojima and his interpreter then spent further time laying it all out. Maybe the full game will make more sense.
Lastly, a chunk of actual gameplay footage, where we see main character Sam – AKA Norman Reedus – doing his rounds as a sci-fi Deliveroo driver. He can take a piss and it grows a mushroom. He can also do a job for a character with the face of Geoff Keighley.
After that clip aired, Keighley expressed delight at being included – his face was scanned some time ago, he said. Kojima also made clear you won’t be able to rotate the camera to see Reedus’ penis.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver turned 20 years old on the 16th August 2019.
Crystal Dynamics’ influential PSone, PC and, later, Dreamcast classic was one of the best single-player adventure games on Sony’s console, and is credited with influencing the genre and its subsequent standouts, such as Uncharted.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver was praised for its story, characters, world design, evocative atmosphere and the mechanic of shifting between two world states, which at the time was hugely impressive.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver was directed and written by Amy Hennig, who took to Twitter to say it “holds a very special place in my heart”. Hennig, of course, would go on to play a key role in the Uncharted series at Naughty Dog.
Back in 2012, Hennig talked Soul Reaver secrets in a post on the PlayStation blog. Initially, Hennig revealed, Soul Reaver wasn’t supposed to be a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, rather a new IP called Shifter that was loosely inspired by Paradise lost.
“The protagonist was essentially a fallen angel of death, a reaper of souls hunted by his former brethren, and now driven to expose and destroy the false god they all served,” Hennig said.
The Shifter concept was “the genesis” of Soul Reaver. “… the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world.
“When we were asked to adapt this concept into a sequel to Blood Omen, our challenge was to take all these ideas and merge them creatively into the Legacy of Kain mythos.”
Hennig and the development team pared back on some secondary features during the making of Soul Reaver, including a plan to include shape-shifting as well as plane-shifting. The biggest challenge, “hands-down”, was getting the data-streaming working to allow the game to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events.
“I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot),” Hennig said.
“It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would’ve embarked on such an ambitious plan if we’d known how difficult it was going to be!”
As you’d expect, implementing the real-time morph between the two environments – that is, figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms – was also a challenge.
But the “ultimate challenge”, Hennig said, was schedule and scope – a common challenge in video game development.
“Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious,” Hennig said.
“Crystal Dynamics’ Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn’t think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate 11th-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that fall, instead of that summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly.”
Raziel, Soul Reaver’s anti-hero.
To hit the August 1999 release date, the developers had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger to set up Soul Reaver 2.
“Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would’ve activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast,” Hennig said.
“Only then would he realise he’d been the Elder God’s pawn all along, that the purging of the vampires had devastating consequences, and that the only way to set things right would be to use Moebius’ time-streaming device to go back in time and alter history (in the sequel).
“So the story would have arrived at a similar place, just by a different route. In the end, as much as I hated its bluntness, Soul Reaver’s ‘To Be Continued’ ending probably turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I think it opened up more interesting story options for the sequels.”
And sequels came. Soul Reaver 2 launched on PS2 and PC in October 2001, Blood Omen 2, which was directed by Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield, came out just a year later in 2002 as a sequel to the first game in the series, before Hennig returned to direct 2003’s Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
Since then, Legacy of Kain has remained dormant. The ill-fated Nosgoth, a free-to-play multiplayer action game developed by Rocket League maker Psyonix, didn’t make it out of open beta. Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun was a more traditional Legacy of Kain game, developed by Climax Studios for Square Enix Europe, but it was cancelled in 2012 after three years of work. (For the inside story on Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun’s demise, check out our in-depth report.)
So, 20 years after Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver came out, it remains for many fans the best game in the series. And with no new Legacy of Kain in sight, perhaps it’ll stay that way for years to come.
During the latest Sea of Thieves weekly stream, a Rare developer accidentally mentioned fire will make its way to the game.
This isn’t the first time James Thomas, lead engineer at Rare, has inadvertently let some secret info slip. Back on a stream in January he revealed parrots were a pet coming to Sea of Thieves, leading to a six month ban from the weekly streams.
“Somehow the parrots have learned to be aquatic,” he said while discussing how the team had designed pets not to follow you into the water. This is quickly followed by a quiet “parrots confirmed” from Joe Neate, executive producer at Rare.
This week, about an hour and four minutes into his first stream back after the ban, Thomas cheerfully begins to tease the fire mechanic, which players hadn’t actually been told about yet.
“I think the biggest thing we’ve announced that we have coming soon is fire, so hopefully there’ll be something for you-” James starts, before quickly being interrupted by co-streamer Andrew Preston, senior designer for the game.
As for this newly teased fire mechanic itself, we don’t actually know anything yet short of the fact it exists. Seeing as pets were announced quite a while ago now and still haven’t appeared in the game, it’ll likely be a little while before we’re able to set anything ablaze in Sea of Thieves.
We hope James Thomas isn’t feeling too burnt up about his mistake, and that Rare lets him off for his accidental act of pyrocy.
