Musings on metapuzzles, part 5: Other puzzlehunt stuff

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.

One thing some hunts do is "meta matching": instead of giving you individual sets of puzzles with a meta for each one, they give you a larger set of puzzles and several metas, and you need to figure out which answer goes with which one. Figuring this out actually uses similar techniques to what I talked about in the last post. You can look for commonalities between answers, or use shells when they're given.

After making that last post where I said these wouldn't have video game analogues, I realized this does have a one: La-Mulana and its ilk, where you're managing a lot of different clues for a lot of different puzzles at once. Organizing information, figuring out where to use it, and keeping track of where it's been used is part of dealing with the more complicated games in that vein.

Every so often there are hunts where a meta's worth of puzzles break the "every puzzle has one answer that's a word or short phrase" convention- either the "word or phrase" part or the "one" part. When that happens, the meta needs to be different to account for how it's using a different type of data. I don't know how this would translate to the video game world at all, since it's about bending or violating a rule that doesn't really exist. Maybe if a game established a rule for how its data collection works, it could then go on and break it?

The Hell, Michigan round is a recent Mystery Hunt example, consisting of seven interconnected puzzles that were unsolvable on their own. Each puzzle needed to be combined with each of the six others to get a different answer for each pair of puzzles. As you'd expect, the metapuzzle for that round used the full graph of twenty-one answers and how they were connected.

I at least want to do a spoiler-free wrapup with some takeaways from this series. I might do the Tunic post before then or not.

You should also read:

Musings on metapuzzles, part 6: Non-spoilery summary/conclusions

The Tunic post might come later, but for now I'll try to put together some sort of takeaways that don't spoil stuff:

  • The definition I'm working with for metapuzzle is a puzzle that brings together information or resources across a broader scope than a single puzzle.
  • In a puzzlehunt, information usually takes the form of puzzle answers, which can be combined either on their own or with some additional information (a shell).
    • In a puzzle game, the information can take many different forms (codes, rules knowledge, lore/story knowledge...), so there needs to be a way to determine what's even part of the metapuzzle.
  • In a puzzlehunt, resources are usually more abstract like a count of puzzles solved, or something other than the answer that you're given as you solve each puzzle.
    • In a puzzle game, that can be something like an object in the puzzle's rule system like "you get a block in the overworld when you solve a puzzle", or a more complex way to affect the metapuzzle's state.
  • Puzzlehunt metas are usually solvable without solving all of the puzzles that feed into them, but the more you have the easier they get.
  • Looking for commonalities is a common skill in puzzlehunt puzzles, and doing so in a puzzle game can be a first step in its own metapuzzle.
  • Breaking the abstraction layer and having the meta more deeply interact with individual puzzles makes design a lot more complex, but oftne makes the experience more cool and memorable.

Thanks for reading!

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Musings on metapuzzles, part 3: Resource metas in puzzle games

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.

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