BrainPuzzles

The Man in the Field

The riddle

A man is found dead in a field. Next to him lies an unopened package. There are no footprints anywhere around him. How did he die?

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His parachute failed to open. The unopened package was the parachute.

No footprints means he fell from the sky, and the package was his unopened parachute.

Go straight to the scene

The same field, painted: five things prove it and nine prove nothing.

What you are looking for

Five objects in that picture explain what happened, and each of them writes a line in the notebook when you find it. The other nine are honest scenery: tap one and it says what it is and why it has nothing to do with this, right under the picture, then dims so you know you have already turned it over. There is no penalty for tapping it, no counter that goes up and no timer running underneath. If three taps find nothing, a free Look closer button appears under the picture and walks you in over three presses: a region in words, then a wide circle, then the thing itself.

Why the picture can be trusted

Every object in this scene was placed by a program that had to prove its work before the scene was allowed to ship. Each findable thing owns a thumb-sized square of the picture that nothing else is drawn over, no two of those squares touch, and every object is drawn the size it would really be at the distance it stands: the plate declares how tall its hedge is and how high the camera was, and the size of a glove or a straw bale follows from that. So a thing you cannot find is hidden, never too small to see and never underneath something else.

The riddle this came from

This case is built on one of our murder mystery riddles, and the whole collection is there with the answer and the reasoning under each. There are hundreds more in the riddle collections. The scene does not restate the riddle: it resolves it, so the answer above and the evidence below cannot drift apart.

When you want a longer one

A crime scene is four or five minutes. The mystery games are the long form: five rooms, five suspects, a different puzzle behind every door and an accusation at the end that follows from what you found. Today's crime scene is always at the crime scene hub.