Musings on metapuzzles, ThinkyCon edition

I gave a talk at ThinkyCon last week about metapuzzles, mostly summing up stuff from the blog but going a little more into the puzzlehunt side since that's something that that audience is less likely to be familiar with. Thanks to the Thinky Games crew, they've already split out the video from the talks, so you can see it on its own:

I also uploaded a PDF of the slides: https://aspeon.neocities.org/stuff/ThinkyCon-2025.pdf

Most of the other talks had something interesting to say, so it's hard to narrow down to a couple of good ones. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the "make a game inspired by a talk" jam that's going on now, though I probably won't be participating myself. (Right now any dev energies I have will probably go towards this year's Confounding Calendar game.)

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 often makes the experience more cool and memorable.

Thanks for reading!

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