Musings on metapuzzles, part 4: Information metas in puzzle games
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.
Puzzlehunts have the convention of "each puzzle has an answer, and that's what feeds into the metapuzzle", so without that you need some other source for context about what you're even looking for. These roughly relate to the puzzlehunt's pure vs shell meta divide: the clue can be the information you're collecting itself, or in some sort of external piece of information.
Like in a puzzlehunt's pure meta, a good starting point for some types of information puzzle is noticing some common trait across several pieces of information. One general case is any game with a “language” that you decipher based on samples of text you find- you see weird symbols and know that they have something to do with each other. While these are a little overdone, they do have the nice advantage of partial solvability: as you collect more text, and more context about what the text might mean, the process of understanding becomes easier.
The "shell" concept shows up a little more directly in some games: something directly associated with the metapuzzle to tell you how to fit things together. One possibility is the place where you enter your answer- when you find the fireplace in Myst, you know you're looking for a pattern of squares in a grid. While the way you actually get the fireplace code in Myst is much more "resource"/"token" based, you could imagine this as the thing that clues you in to finding square patterns in other places.
This was kind of a short one because there's not a lot I can say without spoiling a lot. I might do a deep dive into how Tunic handles some of this stuff. Also, there's some weird stuff puzzlehunt metas have done that I couldn't make a good segue into with this post, so I'll make that a separate post.