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The Story of the Mystery Hunt
Jan. 24th, 2022 06:02 pmAnother year, another Mystery Hunt held remotely. I still miss going to Cambridge and seeing all my Mystery Hunt friends, but it was nice to be able to do puzzles with my partner K.! I'm gradually getting used to not seeing a lot of the puzzles, as my team has gradually evolved from a top-5 team ten years ago (even when we weren't trying to win) to a team that Gets Together And Solves Some Puzzles now, as we've gotten older (and, perhaps, as Hunt sizes have increased). And I think Hunting from home has contributed to that feeling for me, since (unlike at the Hunt in Cambridge in person) I'm not doing basically nothing all day but the Mystery Hunt, but also doing normal household things like cooking dinner, taking out the trash, and so on, which contributes to me seeing less of the Hunt itself.
I think Palindrome put together (with one significant exception) a really good Hunt this year! Basically all of the puzzles I worked on had interesting concepts and fair designs, and I enjoy the way Palindrome uses flavortext cluing. The "bookspace" theme was very broad, but not so much as to make the Hunt feel non-cohesive, and it enabled each round to have its own cohesive theme. (When the Hunt began and I saw that the theme of the first round was children's books, I was like "okay, and so I assume the next rounds will be other genres like mystery and horror," and I was very gratified when those did in fact turn out to be the next rounds.) The round themes seemed pretty well-implemented, in that each puzzle in a round made at least a decent effort to tie in to the round's theme in its content or flavortext, even in the opening rounds where every puzzle's title had to be the name of a children's book. Moreover, they did a good job tying puzzle answers in to the puzzle's theme or flavortext as well, which is nice both for the sake of elegance and because it makes backsolving feel more rewarding. (If you know one of the puzzles in this round must have the answer JAVELIN THROW, but you don't know which, maybe you should guess it for the puzzle whose title is "The Last Olympian"!)
Many recent Mystery Hunts have begun with "warmup rounds", so to speak—a self-contained round with somewhat easier puzzles that has a rewarding structure and conclusion of its own, which smaller or less experienced teams may still be able to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment. This Hunt actually had two such warmup rounds: the opening "Investigation" round, with 10 puzzles and a simple metapuzzle (helpfully flagged for new solvers with an explanation of what a metapuzzle is!), followed by the more complex "Ministry" round, with 25 puzzles, five metas, a meta-meta, and a concluding mini-runaround, still relatively compact and self-contained but with the feeling of a mini-Hunt, even with a prize at the end for teams that completed it. (This isn't counting the pre-Hunt "Star Rats" puzzle round that I never got around to looking at—and so the only thing I have to say about that is that, as always, I find fake Mystery Hunt themes a little tiresome.) Conceptually, I like this scheme a great deal—giving teams at a wider range of skill levels something that feels like full-Hunt experience. And I quite liked the internal structure of the Ministry round; I like the challenge of structures where you have to figure our which puzzle answers feed which metas. However...
The Investigation and Ministry rounds formed bottlenecks where you had to solve the round's meta before you could move on to the next round. The Hunt FAQ stated "Every time you solve a feeder (non-meta) puzzle, you unlock another puzzle.... If there are no more puzzles in that round to unlock, then it will unlock a puzzle in the earliest unlocked round that still has puzzles left to unlock," but that apparently wasn't true for the transition from the Ministry round to the main Bookspace rounds, and my team began to notice it as we solved the last few Ministry puzzles and saw no new puzzles being unlocked. That kind of bottlenecking can be extremely miserable for solvers, especially if they get stuck on a harder-than-expected puzzle. That's exactly what happened to us: we solved all five metas in the Ministry round, backsolved the answers to any individual puzzles we hadn't solved yet, and then the entire team had only one puzzle open for hours. And we got stuck and made no progress and had no idea what to do on that puzzle for quite some time (more on this below), meaning there was an hour or more during which our team had nothing to do except stare at a puzzle that we didn't know how to solve, until we were eligible to request hints on it. That's never a situation you want a solving team to be in. Fortunately for us it happened late at night, so many of our team members were asleep, and by the time the rest of the team woke up we had finally solved the meta and completed the Fruit Around puzzles, so there were multiple new puzzles open for the morning squad to dive into. But for those of us solving between 10pm and 2am PST, the Ministry bottleneck left us very frustrated. I understand that for plot reasons Palindrome didn't want to unlock the main Bookspace rounds until the Ministry meta-meta and Fruit Around had been completed, but I really don't think a team should ever be stuck with only one puzzle to work on until endgame of the whole Hunt.
On the other hand, I really want to compliment Palindrome for the thought and effort they put into accessibility for the Hunt. In many cases, they provided text transcripts for puzzles presented in audio format, and text descriptions for puzzles presented in image format. That wasn't always possible—there were some puzzles where any verbal description of the images would have given away too much of the puzzle, or where the audio element was untranscribable noise, for instance—but I appreciate that did this where they could!
I wish Hunt wrapup meetings would return to a greater emphasis on puzzle content. What I go to wrapup for is to learn about how the rounds and metas worked; I'm not that interested in the writing team's internal logistics, how artists were selected, etc.
What follows are some potentially spoiler-containing comments on specific puzzles!
( Puzzles within! )
A few other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: My First ABC, Crewel, the Herschel Hayden meta, the Randy and Riley Rotch meta, Called Onto the Carpet, the "Unfinished Symphonies" minipuzzle of Endless Practice, and Fruits Stickers (though I moved away from the puzzle after we solved the clues and identified the animals, before moving on to the step involving Japanese orthography and an anime series).
This was a great Hunt, notwithstanding the Ministry bottleneck and I wish I'd seen more of it. Next year, hopefully, back in Cambridge!
I think Palindrome put together (with one significant exception) a really good Hunt this year! Basically all of the puzzles I worked on had interesting concepts and fair designs, and I enjoy the way Palindrome uses flavortext cluing. The "bookspace" theme was very broad, but not so much as to make the Hunt feel non-cohesive, and it enabled each round to have its own cohesive theme. (When the Hunt began and I saw that the theme of the first round was children's books, I was like "okay, and so I assume the next rounds will be other genres like mystery and horror," and I was very gratified when those did in fact turn out to be the next rounds.) The round themes seemed pretty well-implemented, in that each puzzle in a round made at least a decent effort to tie in to the round's theme in its content or flavortext, even in the opening rounds where every puzzle's title had to be the name of a children's book. Moreover, they did a good job tying puzzle answers in to the puzzle's theme or flavortext as well, which is nice both for the sake of elegance and because it makes backsolving feel more rewarding. (If you know one of the puzzles in this round must have the answer JAVELIN THROW, but you don't know which, maybe you should guess it for the puzzle whose title is "The Last Olympian"!)
Many recent Mystery Hunts have begun with "warmup rounds", so to speak—a self-contained round with somewhat easier puzzles that has a rewarding structure and conclusion of its own, which smaller or less experienced teams may still be able to complete and feel a sense of accomplishment. This Hunt actually had two such warmup rounds: the opening "Investigation" round, with 10 puzzles and a simple metapuzzle (helpfully flagged for new solvers with an explanation of what a metapuzzle is!), followed by the more complex "Ministry" round, with 25 puzzles, five metas, a meta-meta, and a concluding mini-runaround, still relatively compact and self-contained but with the feeling of a mini-Hunt, even with a prize at the end for teams that completed it. (This isn't counting the pre-Hunt "Star Rats" puzzle round that I never got around to looking at—and so the only thing I have to say about that is that, as always, I find fake Mystery Hunt themes a little tiresome.) Conceptually, I like this scheme a great deal—giving teams at a wider range of skill levels something that feels like full-Hunt experience. And I quite liked the internal structure of the Ministry round; I like the challenge of structures where you have to figure our which puzzle answers feed which metas. However...
The Investigation and Ministry rounds formed bottlenecks where you had to solve the round's meta before you could move on to the next round. The Hunt FAQ stated "Every time you solve a feeder (non-meta) puzzle, you unlock another puzzle.... If there are no more puzzles in that round to unlock, then it will unlock a puzzle in the earliest unlocked round that still has puzzles left to unlock," but that apparently wasn't true for the transition from the Ministry round to the main Bookspace rounds, and my team began to notice it as we solved the last few Ministry puzzles and saw no new puzzles being unlocked. That kind of bottlenecking can be extremely miserable for solvers, especially if they get stuck on a harder-than-expected puzzle. That's exactly what happened to us: we solved all five metas in the Ministry round, backsolved the answers to any individual puzzles we hadn't solved yet, and then the entire team had only one puzzle open for hours. And we got stuck and made no progress and had no idea what to do on that puzzle for quite some time (more on this below), meaning there was an hour or more during which our team had nothing to do except stare at a puzzle that we didn't know how to solve, until we were eligible to request hints on it. That's never a situation you want a solving team to be in. Fortunately for us it happened late at night, so many of our team members were asleep, and by the time the rest of the team woke up we had finally solved the meta and completed the Fruit Around puzzles, so there were multiple new puzzles open for the morning squad to dive into. But for those of us solving between 10pm and 2am PST, the Ministry bottleneck left us very frustrated. I understand that for plot reasons Palindrome didn't want to unlock the main Bookspace rounds until the Ministry meta-meta and Fruit Around had been completed, but I really don't think a team should ever be stuck with only one puzzle to work on until endgame of the whole Hunt.
On the other hand, I really want to compliment Palindrome for the thought and effort they put into accessibility for the Hunt. In many cases, they provided text transcripts for puzzles presented in audio format, and text descriptions for puzzles presented in image format. That wasn't always possible—there were some puzzles where any verbal description of the images would have given away too much of the puzzle, or where the audio element was untranscribable noise, for instance—but I appreciate that did this where they could!
I wish Hunt wrapup meetings would return to a greater emphasis on puzzle content. What I go to wrapup for is to learn about how the rounds and metas worked; I'm not that interested in the writing team's internal logistics, how artists were selected, etc.
What follows are some potentially spoiler-containing comments on specific puzzles!
( Puzzles within! )
A few other puzzles I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments on: My First ABC, Crewel, the Herschel Hayden meta, the Randy and Riley Rotch meta, Called Onto the Carpet, the "Unfinished Symphonies" minipuzzle of Endless Practice, and Fruits Stickers (though I moved away from the puzzle after we solved the clues and identified the animals, before moving on to the step involving Japanese orthography and an anime series).
This was a great Hunt, notwithstanding the Ministry bottleneck and I wish I'd seen more of it. Next year, hopefully, back in Cambridge!
