Hogwarts Legacy’s Most Frustrating Part Is Skippable With This Trick
By turning Hogwarts Legacy onto story mode, players can unlock doors without taking steps to unlock the Alohomora spell.
Following in the footsteps of the greats that could’ve been the Game of the Year, recently-released and outright controversial Hogwarts Legacy introduced a new mechanic for skipping one of the most frustrating parts of the game—the Alohomora puzzles which safeguard many locks of the Wizarding World. Unfortunately, the Alohomora spell didn’t make it to the recent Hogwarts Legacy crossover with Elden Ring.
According to Gaming Bible, Hogwarts Legacy players can now skip Alohomora lockpicking puzzles in the game. Following the footsteps of God of War Ragnarok and its comprehensive accessibility settings, Hogwarts Legacy allows players to skip the puzzles by switching the game’s difficulty settings to Story mode.
The game already contains numerous spells, some of which are combat spells, while others are used for exploration and puzzle-solving. For example, players can use the Lumos spell to illuminate dark rooms, and Wingardium Leviosa spells to move objects through the air. Alohomora spell, however, is used to pick one of many locks spread throughout the open-world action RPG set in the Harry Potter universe.
This is good news, especially for those who are playing Hogwarts Legacy just for its story. Once players obtain the Alohomora spell, they can pick any Level 1 lock they encounter in the game. This spell is upgradeable to tackle Level 2 and then Level 3 locks, expanding the players’ possibilities for exploration. This is especially true for completionists—those players would have to unlock all locks within the game to complete 100 percent of the game. And considering the number of locks, solving all those Alohomora puzzles can become tedious.
However, there essentially isn’t any real difference between the Level 1 and Level 3 versions of the lock, which means that players have to solve pretty much the same puzzle whenever they find a lock. So, it’s safe to assume that many players would like to skip the process of puzzle-solving completely—since it’s basically the same puzzle.
Story mode is usually the lowest difficulty settings in many games, meant for gamers that don’t want to break their thumbs to enjoy the game’s story. By lowering the difficulty, Hogwarts Legacy players are granted an option to solve the Alohomora puzzle automatically by simply pressing the Square button on PlayStation or the X button on Xbox. Of course, there is a drawback associated with this practice; lowering the difficulty impacts the game’s combat system, reducing combat encounters to mere trivialities.
The alternative would be to complete the game’s main narrative by solving the puzzles manually and then lowering the difficulty to speed up combing through the rest of the content. On the other hand, except for trivializing the game’s combat, lowering the difficulty has no other drawbacks. Still, we feel like the developer should’ve made a greater variety of Alohomora puzzles, given them a greater variance in difficulty, and made skipping the puzzle a toggle option. Hopefully, one of the future updates to Hogwarts Legacy might address this.
Despite being bathed in controversy, Hogwarts Legacy already exceeded Elden Ring’s sales for the same time period. The game is shaping up to become a game of the year contender; however, as we previously stated, whether or not it receives a nomination for the prestigious awards feels more like a matter of politics rather than the question of quality.
