Kuku from Sonicwarp

Craftsman: -
Designer: Sonicwarp

There were a lot of discussion about this new puzzle from sonicwarp in different forums.

The guys at the forum hadn’t solved it right away (or at least didn’t announce it before I ordered one), so it couldn’t be too easy anyway, so I figured why not give this one a try.

It’s priced a lot less then their regular range (Isis & Ramisis) so I got one from Puzzle Box Direct .

It arrived today so I was keen on getting my hands on it. Apparently getting it out of the box was accordingly to sonicwarp supposed to be a small puzzle itself. Its Not =)

Spoiler: Why Not? »

One of the first thing that is going to hit you is the size. It’s about 4cm / 1.6 inches in diameter. In the comparison picture below you can see some references:
1 Euro, a Canadian “twoonie” (2CAD) and a Casino chip sitting on a dollar bill.

I had no problem solving this one, it took only a few minutes actually. Not because I’m all that smart, rather some dumb luck was involved. Even though, I solved it and could take a good look at the internals, it ain’t breeze to repeat the feat.

Kuku size reference

Apparently there seems to exists two versions of the Kuku. Medium and Hard, and unless you ask for the hard one they will ship the medium. (I didn’t know this before I had ordered mine) As far as I know there is no way of telling the two apart on the outside.
This is not something I have verified so if you got more details regarding this please let me know.

However once you have opened your kuku there are tells, that indicate that it can be made harder.

The Kuku itself is made of brushed aluminum and displays very nicely in it’s acrylic case.

As far as value for money I’m a bit torn, since the initial playtime was kind of short… though there is replay value and (maybe) the possibility to modify the difficulty once you open it. However if you are good at decrypting you could easily get your moneys worth IF you manage to solve the vault game that the token inside the kuku gives you access to. Demo of the vault game can be found here.

Edit: I have confirmed that it’s possible to make a medium puzzle into a hard one. The reason why they shipped “mediums” was because they didn’t want to make the initial kuku deliveries impossible to solve. I haven’t tried the “upgrade” yet, but it’s supposed to be much harder then the regular/medium. I know that some pretty good puzzlers out there has been stuck on their hard version for over an week now.
So I’m toning down my conclusion a bit. =) Will update you on how the hard works out for me once I get started.

Conclusion: Get the hard version and nothing else if you are an experienced puzzler.

Semi Spoiler »