Blood in the Snow - Puzzle Guide

After your rude welcome by the Kitsune, you’ll make it into the Teshio Ridge region, with the aptly named superquest The Kitsune ready to go. Like many main quests, The Kitsune is actually a series of smaller quests, the and the first quest in The Kitsune questline is Blood in the Snow. Most main quests aren’t terribly complicated, but The Kitsune questline features some puzzles that may cause you some bother, and if you don’t want to strain your noodle, this page will provide a walkthrough for the quest Blood in the Snow in Ghost of Yotei, with special emphasis on its puzzles!

Page Breakdown¶

Find Intel at the Red Crane Inn¶

Before you can take action, you need to collect info. Enter the main building and Atsu will see herself seated before brushing off some overly friendly Matsumae. Eavesdrop on your fellow patrons and you’ll find two Matsumae soldiers near a gambling table, one of whom mentions the Kitsune. Go up to them, meet the ante of 1,000 mon, and win the match to get them to refer you to their commander. Head upstairs and go into the room they indicated for a scene, then head back downstairs for another scene, which triggers a rare fistfight. This isn’t a mechanically deep bit of gameplay, just punch your foes until they’re all fallen to trigger yet another scene, where a musician named Oyuki decides to be helpful.

Find the Nine Tails at the Shrine¶

Exit the inn and follow a trail to the left to find Oyuki near a horse. Talk to her, examine the buildings she points out as she makes her case for the Kitsune’s malevolence, then follow her to a shrine a short distance to the west from the Red Crane Inn. Pay 200 mon, then follow Oyuki uphill to trigger a scene, after which follow the Nine Tails until they split up, then follow the left-most Nine Tail until you fall into an ambush. Defeat your assailants to trigger another scene.

Fox Shrine Puzzle¶

Head southeast to the location marked on the map to find a small shrine installed into a cliff face. Examine it and note there are two foxes howling (do foxes howl?)… whatever they’re doing here, it looks like howling! Pick up a torch from a nearby brazier and turn around to spot four stone lanterns, two on each side, and one of each pair has a fox figure on it. Light the lanterns with the fox figure on top to open a passage under the shrine which you can crawl through.

Fox Door Puzzle¶

Now that you’re inside the Nine Tails hideout, walk on a balance beam, climb a wall, then grapple across a gap to reach an open area. You’ll predictably be ambushed by two waves of Nine Tails here - defeat them, then look for a sealed gate with two howling fox statues nearby on pedestals, along with two empty pedestals. Looks like we’re going to have to vulpes these pedestals up to get this door open!:

• From the gate, follow the cliff clockwise until you find a tree near a fire. The first fox statue is just in front of this tree. Pick it up, carry it back to the gate and put it on the empty pedestal to the right.

• From the gate, follow the cliff counter-clockwise to find the second fox statue near a bush. Put it on the empty pedestal to the left of the gate.

With those two foxes returned to their proper positions the gate will unlock and you’ll be free to advance.

Cipher Escape Puzzle¶

Go through the gate, turn right, climb a cliff, advance past a chest and find another climbable wall to the left, jump a gap, cross a chain stretched over a chasm, then use a branch to jump across another gap. Next you’ll need to jump across several wooden platforms, turn right and jump onto a cliff you can scale, then jump across more wooden platforms and grapple-swing onto a wooden deck. Note a large and suspiciously inviting building to the right and instead go left and examine a fox statue holding a lantern near some other fox statues - all are adorned by symbols which we can’t make sense of yet. Oh well, nothing for it - time to enter that building.

Examine a scroll inside the building and, unsurprisingly, you’ll be ambushed by Nine Tails. Fend them off, examine the scroll they were guarding, and brush your Dualsense to make a copy of the symbols and their meanings.

Turn around from where you found the scroll and note there are some fox statues near the doors. Examine the one with the upside down trident symbol to open the doors, but do not touch any of the statues with the three-line gravestone marking (at least, it looks like a stylized gravestone to us!).

Fox Statue Turning Puzzle¶

Exit the building and defeat another two waves of Nine Tails, then turn right and head back to the row of fox statues with ciphers on them. Now that we have a copy of the symbols and their meanings, we can get to solving this puzzle! There are four fox statues in front of the lantern-bearing fox statue we examined earlier, and each statue has a symbol on its base. The lantern-bearing fox statue’s symbol just means “Engage”, so that’s the one we’re supposed to interact with later, but the other four fox statues each have a symbol corresponding to a direction; we must rotate each fox statue so it’s facing the direction indicated by its symbol, from the leftmost statue to the rightmost:

• Leftmost Fox Statue: Rotate this statue until the fox is facing right.

• Center-Left Fox Statue: This statue is already facing forward - away from the lantern-bearing statue.

• Center-Right Fox Statue: Rorate this statue until the fox is facing the lantern-bearing statue.

• Rightmost Fox Statue: Rotate this statue until the fox is facing left.

Once the statues are all facing the correct way, a ladder will swing down, allowing you to proceed!

Climb the ladder, enter the building, grab the Nine Trail Armor set, then go through the door marked by the “Engage” symbol and this quest will end. The next quest in The Kitsune questline, The Way of the Shamisen is up next, and more puzzles await you there!