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I dream of puzzles
Jan. 23rd, 2016 02:59 amThis year's Mystery Hunt happened!
I don't have that much to say about the overall plot or structure of this year's Hunt. The structure didn't seem particularly complex—which is totally fine, I should say! Nothing wrong with just writing a solid Hunt that consists of a series of rounds with metapuzzles. (I did enjoy the fact that a couple of the rounds had multiple mini-metas within them and an overall meta-meta.) And honestly my team didn't pay any attention to the plot of the Hunt whatsoever, up to the point of never even watching the videos that were released to us when new rounds were unlocked. The Hunt server problems were a pain, but I salute team Luck for hacking together a solution that got us through the Hunt.
I don't really like obvious fake themes, though. The dog show round was cute, but when people show up at Hunt kickoff and they're like "It's a dog show!" nobody for a second believed that that was the theme of the Hunt, and I just found it tiresome.
My solving experience was pretty up-and-down. The rounds my team got stuck on were the fourth and fifth—so I spent a while frustrated when those were the only new rounds we had open. Then as new rounds were released things picked back up again—until the last few hours of the Hunt, when we had finished most of the later rounds and still had nothing but those fourth and fifth rounds to go back to; and that was when our enthusiasm as a team really started to flag. That said, I did have all of the basic satisfying solving experiences you want to have at a Mystery Hunt: I managed to spot key ahas, find the answer extractions for puzzles that other people had been stuck on, work whole puzzles from beginning to end, and solve metapuzzles. So overall it was a pretty good Hunt for me, even though we didn't finish.
Now I'm going to skip to the part where I discuss specific puzzles I have comments on! ( spoilers below! )
Other puzzles I liked but don't have any comments on: the Whistle Training meta (I didn't even work on this; I just found out about it afterward!); Ladder Dogs; How Far?; Emergency Deportation; It's a Long Story; the Dreamtime Day 2 meta; Who?
That's really a ton of puzzles I liked, and almost no real clunkers. Thanks to team Luck for a great Hunt, and see you all next year!
I don't have that much to say about the overall plot or structure of this year's Hunt. The structure didn't seem particularly complex—which is totally fine, I should say! Nothing wrong with just writing a solid Hunt that consists of a series of rounds with metapuzzles. (I did enjoy the fact that a couple of the rounds had multiple mini-metas within them and an overall meta-meta.) And honestly my team didn't pay any attention to the plot of the Hunt whatsoever, up to the point of never even watching the videos that were released to us when new rounds were unlocked. The Hunt server problems were a pain, but I salute team Luck for hacking together a solution that got us through the Hunt.
I don't really like obvious fake themes, though. The dog show round was cute, but when people show up at Hunt kickoff and they're like "It's a dog show!" nobody for a second believed that that was the theme of the Hunt, and I just found it tiresome.
My solving experience was pretty up-and-down. The rounds my team got stuck on were the fourth and fifth—so I spent a while frustrated when those were the only new rounds we had open. Then as new rounds were released things picked back up again—until the last few hours of the Hunt, when we had finished most of the later rounds and still had nothing but those fourth and fifth rounds to go back to; and that was when our enthusiasm as a team really started to flag. That said, I did have all of the basic satisfying solving experiences you want to have at a Mystery Hunt: I managed to spot key ahas, find the answer extractions for puzzles that other people had been stuck on, work whole puzzles from beginning to end, and solve metapuzzles. So overall it was a pretty good Hunt for me, even though we didn't finish.
Now I'm going to skip to the part where I discuss specific puzzles I have comments on! ( spoilers below! )
Other puzzles I liked but don't have any comments on: the Whistle Training meta (I didn't even work on this; I just found out about it afterward!); Ladder Dogs; How Far?; Emergency Deportation; It's a Long Story; the Dreamtime Day 2 meta; Who?
That's really a ton of puzzles I liked, and almost no real clunkers. Thanks to team Luck for a great Hunt, and see you all next year!
