Musings on metapuzzles ⁽²⁾

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.

I've had some thoughts in my head for a while about drawing a line between puzzlehunt metapuzzles and puzzle game metapuzzles as a blog series or a ThinkyCon talk or something. Then a bunch of conversations about the topic happened on Discords I'm on at the same time, so that prompted me to start getting this written down sooner rather than later.

It's a hard thing to talk about because many of these things are late game or otherwise culminating, so there's a lot of spoilers. (and I haven't figured out how to do spoiler tags with Publii yet) So for now, I'll list spoilers before the break as appropriate.

This time around, vague and out-of-context spoilers for Fez, Noita, and Animal Well...