Here are some weird things puzzlehunts do with metas that I haven't been able to fit somewhere else. The one thing I'll be spoiling is the Hell, MI round from the 2024 Mystery Hunt.

It was harder to find a specific example of an information-based meta that wasn’t a huge spoiler, so I'll be kind of vague and handwavy there. I'll use Myst as kind of an example, but the spoilers are again pretty vague and early-game.

At the start of this I defined metapuzzles as being about collecting information or resources, but as I bring it around to actually talking about puzzle games I'll flip the order and talk about resources first.

This'll have some extremely minor early spoilers for Talos Principle 1 and Bonfire Peaks, and significant spoilers for the Hall of Innovation and Factory Floor rounds from the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Offline project stuff was the big progress this month. The main thing I can share publicly is the metapuzzle blog post series. I'll probably post about that more broadly once I've done part 3, so if you're keeping up with this blog you've been getting a free preview. :)

I've had "try doing something in PICO-8" in the back of my mind for a while, but seeing Adam Saltsman's games lately have reawakened that itch. Maybe I'll give that a shot next time I have some gamedev cycles?

On the gameplay side, King Hesper's still looming large. I'm approaching the end of chapter 7, but the levels have gotten very difficult. I could maybe do a post about Nextfest demos too- the short version is Gentoo Rescue and Art of Reflection were puzzle highlights, and Angeline Era was intriguing even though I haven't played the games that inspired it.

If you're familiar with puzzlehunts, this one might be a little redundant. If you aren't, here's a pretty detailed post with an introduction to the sorts of puzzles you see there.

I'll be spoiling an old puzzle of mine: Wario, from the 2021 Microsoft Puzzlehunt. If you want to try solving it yourself, you can check the final answer here, or the individual minipuzzles at 9-Volt, Ashley, Dribble & Spitz, Jimmy T, Mona, Orbulon. There's a full solution here.