Stuck in Hollowreach Expedition? Read the walls

Hollowreach Expedition tells its story almost without words, which is lovely until you hit a puzzle and have no idea what to do. The good news is that the answers are usually right in front of you.

Whenever we got stuck, backing up and looking at the murals solved it more often than not. The game paints its clues onto cave walls and machinery — a sequence of symbols, a shape that matches a lever, a path of light.

Pay attention to sound, too. Certain mechanisms hum when they're active, and following that hum led us to several switches we'd walked right past.

If a climb looks impossible, it probably needs something activated first. The world is built in a loose order, and the designers rarely stick a dead end in front of you without a nearby solution.

Resist the urge to look up a guide for the first hour. The joy of this one is the slow click of understanding, and rushing past that with a walkthrough robs it of its best moments.