Huntinality Recap

Going to try and get back into hunt recaps~~ (spoilers ahead obv)

I ended up doing this hunt with only a team size of three as we were a little short-handed due to conflicts, which I felt hurt us a bit, but I still really enjoyed this hunt! We may have slipped down the standings a bit from the average we seemed to be settling in, but it was to no fault of the hunt.

First of—I think this theme was absolutely top-notch. I think puzzlehunt theming/story is at its best when it’s got the tinge of self-aware humor and irony that the story is just a ridiculous way to justify puzzle-solving (even though I do think the story can definitely amplify the solving experience and also be sincere). Waluigi is perfect for this in my opinion. I also liked getting the prologue ahead of time to both not skip it in favor of going straight to puzzles, while also building hype for the hunt.

1st Round

I’d like to highlight Wah-spkeeping as a puzzle that seemed like a pain, and my teammates refused to do as a result, but I chugged through and found a sort of perverse delight in doing it, and once I got into the rhythm of really FEELING the hexadecimal, it was kind of fun. I think what made it significantly better than I feared it would be was that we really had lots of redundant information, so the logic steps weren’t too hard.

I thought the meta here was really quite good. I like it when we start getting answers and there’s just no discernible pattern and you’re just convinced there’s no way a meta can tie them together. Those are always fun metas. We solved this meta with just four puzzles (except for Wah-wwa Wia and Wah-rcade) so we wanted to backsolve. I was really proud of seeing Google Forms/Sheets, and starting looking for good answers to go with it. Little did we know we had also messed up the transcription for the numbers into our sheet, and so we had the wrong numbers for the gold answer. This made it hard to backsolve (I was sad there wasn’t a gold/yellow Legends of the Hidden Temple team; I thought that would have been a good addition).

Funnily enough, CASCADING STYLE SHEETS is the top result on onelook for “* sheets”, but I skipped past it in favor of stuff like MUSIC SHEETS for the other puzzle.

As for those puzzles forward; we were very close on both. We had CES instead of CSS, which was a mistake I gathered several other teams made. How I didn’t connect this to the backsolve until much later is a mystery to me. We also had about half of the answers for Wah-wwa Wia, but didn’t see how to extract. Eventually once I fixed the transcription problem, I was able to find the Pirates team, and onelook suggested PIRATES OF PENZANCE. Once I looked at our spreadsheet, I saw there was great overlap in the letters we wrote down and it was the right length, but I never saw the extraction that was desired (we wanted to somehow take the modified letter, but that was ambiguous anyways).

2nd Round

I thought Piles of Letters was an incredibly fun puzzle. It was intimidating to start, but the logic of recreating the boards was really neat. A-maze-ing is also good (but I also love Pokemon so I’m clearly biased); I like the transformation puzzle genre in general, but especially when you get to apply all of them to a single string. It’s neat.

Juice Factory was also neat, as it gave me something to do that I didn’t expect, namely listen to all the ringtones on my phone over and over again. It was alarming to both hear my ringtone, my alarm, and an alarm my roommate used. I also feel like I should have recognized the apple aha a little sooner than I did given I’ve worked with this data set in a puzzle before.

The meta was pretty impressive. It’s certainly a different style of meta—to have lots of shell information and just have to sift through it—but I thought the three-different-extractions method worked quite well. We also came into this one missing two puzzles (LOLO and Languages), and backsolving those from this meta might possibly be one of the most satisfying puzzling experiences I’ve ever had. It was quite tricky but very doable. I thought this was also true for the first meta, where it was also incredibly fun to backsolve, but it was even more so here. I don’t really think this should be a goal of meta authors, but it was great that it worked out that way.

3rd Round

I loved this round. I love incremental/idle games. The surprise I had upon entering this round was really great, and it delivered. I love both the post-hunt victory lap feel of this, but still the neat embedding of puzzles into the environment. It really was just all-around fun. That said, we got terribly stuck on the final meta because even though we got the SUPER* aha quickly, we just couldn’t see that diagram. Looking at the scoreboard (as we slipped further and further down after having to give up for the night and return to finish it the next day) no other team near us struggled nearly as much on the final round, so this is definitely a us-not-you situation. Nonetheless, I think the reason was this hunt had so high production value around the UI (particularly when it wasn’t even necessary, like Wahr-cade) that the UI for the idle game just was invisible to me. Again, this is definitely our fault and it’s totally fair, it was just disappointing to be stuck for over a day on this part (and end up needing a hint to finish).

Regardless, this hunt was great and really solidified its place in the world of puzzlehunts.