Riddle Me This

Before I begin, the following post is more for my entertainment and contains spoilers for The Batman (2022), so this is your warning to not continue reading on after this point. You have been warned.

Now, moving on, I'm not reviewing the movie in this post (not like how I did a couple years back when I saw the movie The Joker (2019) but I will be discussing some points about it as it is pertinent to my little bit of fun.

 The movie's main antagonist was Edward Nashton, a.k.a. The Riddler, and there were some solid riddles/puzzles to be solved by Batman as the movie progressed through the roughly 1 week time span as the crimes were committed and Batman tries to solve and apprehend part of his Rogues Gallery in his now second year of fighting crime.

This Riddler made usage of substitution ciphers and left coded words that can be used to give Batman a clue of what's to come or what the next step has to be. Some of the puzzles when solved don't make as much sense to him initially, but then as the words are said and thought out, it reads as something that is rather ambiguous to what the initial decoding meant.

As the film ends, some viewers (like myself) are wondering, "what happens if you try going to rataalada.com (something within the movie)?" If you do, you will eventually get a prompt to "CLICK FOR A REWARD" (don't worry this is official Warner Bros site, it's not harmful, or if it is, whoops).

This is the "reward":

It is a coded message utilizing the same substitution cipher used in the film.

Now I looked at it and figured that it must be solvable, otherwise why have an interactive website that leads to an image of random letters and symbols, or just symbols since there aren't any actual letters within the English alphabet present at first glance. I'm not a professional puzzle solver so if left to my own devices, I wouldn't know how to start taking a crack at it. All I would know is that if it is trying to say something that you got to try to count any repeating symbols and treat them as (most likely) vowels. From there, slowly break through it as the letters are assembled and see what repeats throughout and what doesn't. I guess that means a trial and error method and it could be time consuming.

However, I had an edge because all I had to do was do 2 Google searches and I solved it on my own (with the assistance of the Google searches. No I did not ask Google what the answer was, I just needed to look at some of the previous riddles shown in the movie as I figured that it would have to correlate otherwise we'd be dead in the water and have to start from scratch). Luckily my searches proved to be fruitful. Using the answer for the first riddle in the movie for "What does a liar do when he's dead?" as well as the second puzzle's solution, there was enough in each of those two (of which everything used the same cipher) to crack it.

It made me feel good because it was a fun little way to keep me, as the consumer, engaged and thinking about the movie. And considering that I once claimed the mantle of the Batman (I mean have you seen the title of this here blog?), I figured this was a good way to test my mental strength. It's not a super hard test considering I had resources and was able to crack through it using it, but still a fun little brain exercise.

Okay so all of this rambling for what? Well, I solved the above puzzle. It took me about 40 minutes. The initial minutes were spent just staring at it to see if I can recognize where certain symbols repeated to try to formulate what letter it might be. After about 10 minutes, I decided to do some digging. I searched for the image of the first riddle, and then used that as a reference to start assembling letters out of the mess of the symbols. From there I began to get a little stumped as the letters within "HE LIES STILL" have several repeating letters and it doesn't get you very far. Eventually I thought about the next puzzle which spelled out "YOU ARE EL RATA ALADA" which can be found on some of the promotional imagery to get a good look at the symbols used there. From that second solution, I was able to pull enough different letters to have the majority of words within my grasp and then it was a simple process of filling in the remaining blanks and seeing if those newly guessed blanks were also in any other words.

And the result?

"YOU THINK IM FINISHED BUT PERHAPS YOU DONT KNOW THE FULL TRUTH EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING SOMETHING IS COMING"

Don't mind the chicken scratch of handwriting, I did this on my phone and used my finger to write it out

After seeing this final puzzle solved, it leads to one thinking, "well yeah we could've figured that much since there's no way that the Riddler getting locked up next to the Joker (who wasn't officially established yet, but context clues confirm it) would be the end of them. Especially considering Batman was only in his second year of crusading to clean up Gotham's streets." But it still was quite a lot of fun as I slowly pieced it together.

Like I said, while I do like to tote this as I solved it, I had help from the already solved riddles from the movie. I definitely wouldn't be sharp enough to be like Batman just yet, but what's a little fun and imagination going to do?

So enjoy my few moments of detective work or what have you, and let me enjoy my moment.