Solo Adventures - Hunt20 (Day 1)

Hunt20

To see spoilers, just hover over the spoilered text.

Remember how in my DaroCaro posts, I said I was not sure if I’ll do Hunt20 yet? Well guess who has a puzzling problem!

I did “start” this hunt live¹ and got partially spoiled on little bits of the hunt elsewhere, but it’ll still be a fun one to tackle.

That said, let’s dig in!

Harry Potter

This puzzle, I had already solved when I tackled it solo. I like it. Simple, clean, neat. I think I even attempted solving it without a spreadsheet (it didn’t work). Cute and clean.

For completeness, I did solve the puzzle again right now. Surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly), I could solve nearly all the clues by heart.

Steady sailing from start to end. The BLIND aha took me a lil bit, but didn’t otherwise slow me down. Similarly, the final cluephrase took me a hot sec (RANTY ILBH for the win) but got it within the minute. Nice puzzle, clean execution.

Treasure Island

Saw the puzzle, knew what to do immediately. I love Scratch and giving it as a tool for making the jigsaw bit was really smart. So far I’m very impressed with the high QOL improvements given in this hunt. Very nice.

Once I got to the Star Battle, I got a lil bit stuck a couple times. Had to bifurcate twice to run myself into the ground, only to realise I made a silly error on my next try. Eventually I just threw it all on a star battle solver, just to be sure this puzzle was solvable (And that I didn’t do any silly transcription errors.² Midway through the next star battle solve, I saw the letters (neatly highlighted by my Conditional Formatting) and made a simple Nutri formula to extract the final cluephrase (Why? because I could).³

After calling in the answer, I went back to the puzzle and solved it manually. It was fun. Overall puzzle was simple, clean and neat. (I’m sensing a theme through this hunt). I liked!

Lord of the Rings

I was mildly spoiled on this one from earlier (just the fact that you put letters in the grid, so nothing big), so tried to avoid it for slightly later. Image ID was suprisingly unambiguous, and I got almost all of them first try. After a couple tries, putting all the words in the grid was clearcut. Made a mistake with ISABELLE, but somehow still extracted the right letter. Nutrimaticked the answer, then used a simple crazy function to Nutrimatic the other IDs.

Simple, clean. Nice puzzle. I like! I am mildly amused and happy that they actually provided a GSheets template for this.

Six of Crows

Took me a short while to get the aha, but I got there. Smooth sailing afterwards, getting to solve the entire puzzle with moderate googling and Onelook. Once I figured out the extraction, QAT (link - spoilers obv) helped me get the remaining clues, so that was nice.

Overall, direct and clean. Nice.

Divergent

Before this one unlocked, I felt like the puzzles were slowing down slightly kinda, so this was a nice change of pace.

I “think” I was sorta spoiled on the first aha (but it didn’t matter as it came naturally to me anyway). The overall puzzle was pretty smooth and pretty much worked exactly as I expected apart from the fact that I needed 15 minutes to realise 100 years is not DECADE, heh. Otherwise, simple, clean, nice.⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸

Meta : Percy Jackson

I kinda knew what to do from the start. Not happy with some of the ambiguity though. I can kinda sorta see a cluephrase but it’ll take a lot more guesswork than I want to do.

I guess it’s time to wait for more feeder answers then.

…(10 minutes later) I got it. Realised that this might be more “percy jackson monsters” than generic monsters (still not sure if it is). Realised I had TROLL as regeneration because of DnD and Harry Potter books, instead of HYDRA. Slotted in the right one. Got Nutrimatic giving me the answer phrase instantly. Solved!

I thought this was a bit ambiguous, and I’m not really happy with that. Gryphon vs Griffin vs Griffon, for one Not checking out the answers yet, but I wonder what it’ll be. Either way, it’s done, so I can continue. Not looking likely like I’ll backsolve (Tried 10ish attempts on each puzzle before leaving it).

I wish the puzzle had decided to Reorder the books to make the monsters alphabetical. It’s simple enough but would have been fairly cleaner.

Arbitrary Break

So far the puzzles are all nice and easy, and most of all, super pleasing. I’m starting to wonder just how little patience I had while solving Hunt20 last time. I REALLY didn’t have the patience for this ;-;

I am super impressed by the QoL and polish for this hunt. It’s the standard I try to reach, and I think all hunts should generally try to do. So I’m happy with how things are so far.

An interesting thing I realised is that Hunt20 did “A round where every puzzle is a book” before MH22 and “Let’s stop this asteroid from hitting Earth!” before GPH22. A hunt ahead of its time!

Off to round 2 we go!

… (Sleep break) So one day later, I have not touched any of my 3+3 open puzzles at all any further. Instead I was watching “Drive to Survive”, Season 4 on Netflix. It’s a documentary about Formula 1, with Season 4 being about the 2021 World Championship. ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ Maybe I’ll solve tomorrow.

… (Sleep Break x2) So fun story. I have completely forgotten about puzzling these last two days (instead binging S1-3 of Drive to Survive). What can I say, it’s a fun show. Plus, ECPH is coming so I need to be ready to solve that. So… I guess I’mma just post this one as is, and get back and hopefully get unstuck on Hunt20 when I return ;-;

Unsolved Puzzles

I am Number Four

This is one of the puzzles I absolutely couldn’t crack last time, and got spoiled on. So I’m gonna delay this one as long as I possibly can.

…Which is apparently a long enough time, as the meta is down, and I only have a handful of clues filled in. I already remember the “misheard common phrases” aha, and a few clues. And it’s not like I can un-remember either, so just gonna fill them in. But otherwise I am actually fairly stuck, not making a good amount of progress on the remaining clues. I guess my tirade against all pronunciation/homophone based things continues ;-;

Miss Peregrine

I have no idea where to begin on this. Just going to come back later

The Hunger Games

I sorta got most of the clues, but not sure what to do with them. This feels like one of those puzzles that’ll crack if I stare at it long enough, but let’s see.

math.references.unsort()

For some definition of the word start, anyway. I did “one” puzzle solo (Yes that is indeed my solo team :p ) and then decided to join up with a fellow friend, who promptly and very dramatically ditched me to solo the hunt instead ;-; ↩
Don’t worry, I didn’t actually use their solution, just got back to another star battle run once I knew there “was” a solution. Also I didn’t make any transcription errors, so yay me. ↩
Have I told you guys how amazing conditional formatting is? It’s like a piece of the holy grail that glues my puzzling together. ↩
(The Divergent Movie) This is also roughly when I decided I felt like watching a movie, so picked up Divergent on a whim. Now half my screen has Netflix and the other half, puzzles. It’s pretty interesting (and I’m used to it). ⁵ ↩
(The Divergent Movie) I gotta say though, 30 mins in and it feels like a pretty YA-full movie. All the tropes I would expect, not all of them good. The villains are way too tropey ;-; ⁶ ↩ ↩²
(The Divergent Movie) 1h in, and the obviousness of the stereotypes are getting to me ;-; But I’m not leaving a movie unfinished, so. ⁷ ↩ ↩²
(The Divergent Movie) Oh god finally the movie is over. This was an ordeal and a half, and too many zero dimensional characters, but it’s over. I don’t know how this blog became movie review from puzzle review, but thank god the movie is over. ⁸ ↩ ↩²
(The Divergent Movie) I just rage-read all of the future book spoilers, juust so I won’t be tempted to watch those movies. I can be a sucker for pain sometimes ;-; Anywhoo… Back to the puzzles I guess. ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) #notsponsored. But it is a very good show though. I really liked everything, from the story¹⁰ to the sound¹¹ to just the general storylines coming out of the season¹² to… Well everything. It was a very well written show, and it really “feels” real ¹⁵, even if you’re “spoiled” on the ending (thanks to Wikipedia or following the races like a regular F1 fan). 10/10 would recommend.¹⁶ ↩
(Drive to Survive) Funny word to use in a documentary, “story”… But that’s exactly what it was. What stories to edit and which to leave out of the season. I really noticed and sorta liked the “Every episode ends on an upbeat story for whoever we’re following” choice. Which they could have really done the opposite on. ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) I think in general, sound design in all our media has gotten to a scary level of competence-perfection. I know they’re trying to make us feel specific things by framing things this way and that, but somehow everytime the right sounds come out… I still feel the exact things they want me to feel. It’s immersive and awesome, but also somehow super scary in one respect. ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) I know, I know. They don’t actually have control over “that” either, but I still can’t not feel hype about F1 as a sport that I used to love because of this show.¹³ ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) Fun story about that. I still remember being a 11 year old watching Schumacher’s (Michael not Mick) last race before retirement (his first retirement, not second) at something ungodly like 3 am in the night on a small Black and White TV and sobbing to myself because he lost. One of my strongest held memories of F1, so it was good to come back to those.¹⁴ ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) Checks the time… Well at least the “ungodly hours watching F1” bit of me havent changed. ↩ ↩²
(Drive to Survive) I think even little things like “Let unscripted bits be in the final product” have become such an art, making things feel so much “real” and closer in a documentary. ↩ ↩²
Also… Has this somehow taken a turn from being a puzzlehunt blog to a Movie&Media review blog? ;-; ↩ ↩²