Song Of The Sands

Quest Realm: Alfheim

This picks up immediately after tracking the quest in the Alfheim desert, which is only possible after completing Secret Of The Sands and beginning The Elven Sanctum.

Immediately after completing Secret Of The Sands and tracking The Elven Sanctum quest to progress further onwards into the desert, you may hear dialogue about another storm. Additionally, you may see an interact prompt. Hit this to open a chisel door, which in turn leads to a companion prompt.

After a while of running, Atreus will say he sees a way in. Continuing to nav assist will get you there and, thankfully, this one does not seem to have the circular looping issue as the entrance in Secret Of The Sands did.

Climbing down as before with infrequent presses of nav assist when you stop moving and interacting if needed, you’ll eventually draw your weapons after some dialogue.

<!–, press nav assist when you stop and see a distant interact prompt. After that singular press, move forward a little to hit said interaction.

The radius to hit this is small, but you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting it to work.

Once you’ve interacted successfully, keep manually moving forward. Once you are unable to move forward further, move to your left.

Once you stop moving left, press nav assist and move forward again until you re-draw your weapons.

–>
Back on solid ground, nav assist onwards, periodically aiming until you hear a companion cue.

Hit this with a sonic arrow, or several as I did, to let you progress via a newly revealed prompt.

Entering a new area via nav assisting, if you hear an interact to your left, move forward past it and you’ll be able to hit a necessary blade point to progress.

If you nav assist forward and are able to drop down via a blades auto-traversal then you’re on the correct path. If not, keep nav assisting, interacting and moving forward until you utilise that blade auto-traversal as previously stated.

If you interact with the point in front of you, you’ll have some dialogue letting you know of the first of many:

Puzzle

• Turning back around and interacting after Atreus says what about from down here? will allow you to get back to solid ground
• note that the checkpoint, should you choose to restart or save here, leaves you before the drop down after going forward from earlier.
• Turning to your left, aim and shoot a couple of sonic arrows. Sadly, there is no cue for what your trying to hit, but Atreus will confirm that the hive matter doesn’t like sound.
• The game does actually snap you to the element you’re trying to hit as well, so this should hopefully be easier than most puzzles without cues, especially if you make a shot by restarting the checkpoint and dropping down from the traversal.
• From there, hit nav assist, aim and shoot at another uncued object. You may hear a subtle breaking sound alongside the arrow, with no success dialogue.

End Of Puzzle

Navigate up the back-to-back blades prompts in front of you that you’ve just made passable, then go through a second series into a climb as Mimir talks about the surfaces being old.

Climb the wall you’ve latched to by pressing nav assist then moving forward, then once again blades interact to disengage onto solid ground, after a while of climbing.

At the top of this surface, you’ll be at the start of another

Puzzle

• Without nav assisting, aim and you should hear a cue. This is actually for some twilight stone.
• Nav assist from here until your beacon rotates to your right slightly, then aim and you should hear the cue again. This is because you’ve moved positions to attempt line up the shot.
• Throw and if you are indeed in the right place, you should hear a prolonged series of bounces and hive matter vanishing as before, with some confirmational dialogue.
• if not, keep nav assisting round and hitting the cue, using that right-hand rotation as a metric to work from

End Of Puzzle

Nav assist on from here and, after you drop down via a blades traversal, you’ll enter combat with some wretches and a nest that must be removed.

Those dealt with, nav assist, interact to use a blade point, then drop down via auto-traversal into even more combat with numerous poisonous enemies and some elves as well.

Those foes defeated and with discussions of territory changing hands, nav assist your way First through a climb, then another blades series.

Once you disengage, after a while, Atreus might say about getting past the thick hive, heralding another:

Puzzle

• Nav assist until your feet stop moving, then aim and you should snap to an object that has no cue.
• Shoot this with Atreus’ sonic arrows, this reveals the reflect point.
• Throw your axe at this immediately and you’ll see, as usual, bounces and hive matter obliteration.
• Note that if you don’t do this quickly enough, you’ll have to re-shoot with Atreus and re-attempt the throw.

End Puzzle

Press nav assist once and you should be able to aim for another cue, this time for a small loot drop.

From here, nav assist into a series of blade prompts. Out of that series, manually run forward to avoid getting disoriented and then hit another blades series via nav assist.

You’re once again on a climbable surface, climbing down and nav assisting to orient you should allow you to progress.

Once you move forward and disengage, you’ll enter combat including with some poisonous enemies and orb-throwing elves, the latter of whom are a little frustrating to deal with.

Foes dealt with, nav assist onwards, you have the opportunity for a very useful legendary chest here.

Legendary Chest

• Nav assist through any interactions you might find, until you climb a wall.
• On reaching the top, stop moving, look to your right and aim for a throw cue.
• If you hit it and find that the axe doesn’t bounce too far, then look to your right a little more (for maybe half a second or so) and re-snap to attempt a throw on a second cue, which is your intended target, more twilight stone.
• If successfully hit, this destroys the hive material you need to progress, but there’s something else to do first.
• Manually take the climb back down, first moving down, then looking down to hit the auto-traverse and finally moving left until you disengage at the bottom of the wall.
• Now, turn so the interact for that climb we just reversed is directly to your left, but still visible in your audio field.
• Aiming should snap you to the correct direction to head in, though there isn’t a throw cue to hit here.
• You should come to a prompt on your right, you may have to manually reposition yourself to hit this.
• Hit that prompt to swing up into a climb. Move forward, then look right to hit an auto-traverse prompt.
• From here, continue right and then forward again once you stop moving in those respective directions, until you disengage.
• You’ll disengage into a blades interact, which you can hit to get back onto solid ground again.
• Manually moving left should give you an interact prompt for the chest, though you may also have to look to your left to get it to appear.
• This legendary chest gives you Hell’s touch, a light runic for the axe that was actually from the previous game.
• Runic obtained, restart checkpoint here. You shouldn’t lose any progress, but you should instead skip the frustrating reversal process you’d have to go through otherwise to get back to where you want to be.

Restarting the checkpoint after obtaining that chest, you’ll be at the start of another:

Puzzle

• Nav assist down a blades traversal until you hear a distant interact prompt to your right. This drop can seem rather tricky to get, so take as many runs as you need, including restarts.
• We suggest saving here as this puzzle is extremely tricky. This blades traversal you’ve just dropped down from is just after where you’ll begin on reloading your save.
• Take the blades prompt back up and then redo the drop down to orient yourself. From here, stop moving and look to your right until the hive matter’s audio is in the centre of your stereo field.
• From there, look up and keep aiming, you should eventually snap onto a throw cue.
• However, you are currently in the wrong position to hit this throw successfully.
• A singular roll to your left should put the blades prompt we just used back in view, as a clear interact cue.
• Snapping your aim back to the cue in front of you, you are technically in line, but you have to account for the axe’s own arc during the throw.
• Move your right stick up in very small increments and reattempt the throw each time you do so.
• The axe isn’t far off to begin with here, so this should only take you a couple of attempts if you’re positioned correctly.
• There will be no success dialogue, but this is one of the more frustrating puzzles, as you’re just making a single throw over and over again and hoping it lands. If we find a better way to set this up, the guide will be updated.

End Of Puzzle

From here, nav assist your way forward, until you come to yet another blades prompt. As you continue onwards, you’ll have a quest update and some dialogue.

Nav assist until your feet stop moving, then manually moving around a little should allow you to aim at what Atreus identifies as twilight stone.

Hitting this throw cue reveals an interact prompt, interact with this to swing you up to a platform.

Nav assist until your feet stop moving, then unstick yourself by going to the right to move away from the geometry in front of you.

As you nav assist onwards, you’ll find an aim cue again, but this isn’t actually what you’re trying to hit. Instead aim slightly to your left and re-snap onto one of those sonic shootable objects that has no cue.

Roll left to re-snap to this and take this out as before, revealing a distant throw cue.

Remember that these close up, so shoot and then axe throw quickly to open it and hit the twilight stone behind it, taking out the hive matter in the process.

If successful, you’ll hear the Hafgufa roar and some Atreus dialogue.

Nav assist back through a blades prompt and keep aiming until you find a throw cue. If you don’t take out all the hive matter (signified by that low rumble you’ll be accustomed to), roll back and re-aim to try and get the shot. This shouldn’t hopefully be too much trouble, at least it wasn’t in testing.

This reveals an interact prompt behind the matter, swinging you back up onto another platform.

Press nav assist once immediately and aim for a throw cue again, with the blades interact directly to your right.

Hit this and you’ll take out the rest of the hive matter, giving you another quest update and some dialogue about getting back to the surface.

After navigating through some more blades interactions, you’ll drop down into combat.

Dealing with these multiple larger foes, who can be brutally hard to defeat at times, nav assist to point you towards an interact prompt.

As a note for the larger enemies, the AOE spitting-style attack can be avoided by dodging backwards if you know it’s coming, at least from my testing.

Combat over, the interact you pointed yourself towards via nav assist should only be used after manually moving and looking to the left of it, to claim the legendary chest that these were guarding, using its own interact cue.

This chest gives you whispering slabs (a crafting component) and the Nemean Crush blades heavy runic attack.

Nav assisting onwards from here, as you climb via an interact, Kratos and Atreus talk about the fate of these creatures.

Keep nav assisting, climbing and auto-traversing and, during one such climb, you’ll reach another blade series. Use this to disengage from the climable surface.

Nav assist along until your beacon rotates to your right, then aim and hit a twilight stone cue. If successfully hit, you should see a new interact prompt come into view.

Hit this to start a brief blade series, then grab the resource chest on your left.

Nav assist around until you see an interact on your right. This is the blade prompt you just used, but this is also where you can hit aim to target a spinner, beginning a brief

Puzzle

Saving here is important, as this should start you in the same place, with the same type of throw available first every time. Specifically, this is a 3 hit throw that will not, unfortunately, complete the puzzle automatically.

Hit nav assist once and, if you’re unlucky, you’ll turn around to be aimed at another piece of twilight stone.

What you’re actually looking for is a target up and to the right of that, which is for that spinner from earlier.

Looking to the right for about half a second then upwards as much as you can, then aiming, should snap you to the spinner itself.

Hit this twice to spin the reflector panel to what should be the correct position

then pressing nav assist to orient and look left for about half a second should hopefully get you in line with the correct target.

Aim and throw at this final cue and, if successfully hit, you should be able to throw and see multiple bounces and hive matter being removed.

Given there are so many throw cues around, finding this final one can be frustrating. If we find a better setup for this later, we’ll update the guide accordingly.

If you can’t find the reflector panel, try hitting the spinner again and keep looking for that second, lower throw cue, which tells you that the panel is aligned correctly for you to take the shot.

End Puzzle

Annoying spinner puzzle done with, nav assist and interact for a blades prompt, then climb up and interact at the top to once again, dramatically smash through the ceiling.

Interact again to disengage, then moving forward you’ll enter some combat, though geometry might prevent you from dealing with it at first.

That done with, nav assist to a climb interact, moving up then right once you’re stuck, then forward at the end of that section until you reach the top.

Nav assist onwards, then hit an interact and hold to break the last binding, freeing the creature, completing the quest with some more great dialogue and eventually a quest completion.

If you want one final stationary raven for now, restart checkpoint, press nav assist once, then run forward and keep aiming. You may get a cue, but if not you may be able to line this up manually as you’ve done previously.

If you are doing this quest as part of the late game, you could always utilise your third weapon for an easier shot at this feathered collectable. I’d recommend saving after you hit this raven so you don’t forget it.

You can now return to what ever else you were doing in game.