Eh, nevermind, I broke down and watched the videos. That's...well, I can see the hint in hindsight, but that's really, really obtuse. To be honest I didn't even think anything of the weird spelling, I just thought it was a typo or an archaic spelling or something.
I feel like a lot of the later puzzles drift too close to
this. Maybe I just somehow missed a ton of hints, but from the sunlight-block puzzle onward it was just one brick wall after another. I figured out the "9 souls" and music puzzle, but was stumped on everything else. The early puzzles make logical sense, but by the mid- and end-game ones I was reduced to just trying anything I could think of in the hopes that blind luck would get me the right answer. I kind of stumbled on the music puzzle solution too -- it makes a certain degree of sense, but I still pretty much guessed. (At least I didn't have to recreate some famous real-life tune or anything like that. Small mercies.) And does the maze thing have
any hints at all? Both I and the Let's Players both just ran around blindly until we stumbled on the answer.
Also, I have to agree with some other posters that the game is
slow. For most of the game I was okay with it, like, alright, this is atmospheric, but in the final boss fight it's just painful. It's a long,
long corridor walk just to get there filled with stairs that slow you down, then even if you've gone back to save after the first cutscene, there's still a fairly long one before you actually fight the boss. By the fifth time you're watching the pre-battle cutscene, the pauses are no longer atmospheric, they're just infuriating. Maybe put a save point right before so that players don't have to walk through the corridor every time?
Speaking of which, the final boss fight is pretty unclear as well.
I thought the torches were just passively weakening it or something and I didn't have to do anything directly, but apparently you have to lure it into the torchlight (which looks like it's making it stronger) in order to kill it? That's a mechanic that doesn't appear anywhere else with the shadow monsters and isn't hinted at at all. Maybe another scroll saying the dragon is different from the shadow monsters or needs to become solid for the sword to hit it or anything, really.
The logical leap just felt too extreme for me. Maybe other players felt differently and I'm just bad at puzzles, I don't know.
The atmosphere and visuals of the game were really good, but the endgame puzzles really soured my taste for the whole thing, which is unfortunate.
(And wait, the telekinesis puzzle is optional? I thought you needed it for the thing that comes after the maze.)