So… That was one of the Mystery Hunts of all time. There were awesome things, there were annoying things, and then there were eh things. This is me talking about things.1 Some of these things have been said better (Case in point, see Betaveros’ blog post, which I agree with almost completely).

For context, I solved with my usual squad, The Mathemagicians (previously Team Arithmancy). We started with MH21 and solved 50ish puzzles (to come in ~79th); then at MH22, solved 60 puzzles to be roughly 38th; and now solved ~75 puzzles to come in ~30th. We were almost entirely online (Between 1-2 people on site).

This post will have general structural spoilers (what unlocks after what), mild plot spoilers, names of puzzles/rounds, and small spoilers for older MHs. All MH23 spoilers will be tagged, like this. Just hover over them to view.

Important note - The names of certain rounds are spoilers for Reactivation. The names have been spoilered, but be warned.

No Spoilers - Things that left me wanting

  • NOT the difficulty. Enough people have spoken about this already. But frankly, I didn’t care. It was longer or harder, sure. So was Teammate 21 compared to literally every non-MH hunt I have ever solved. It took effort to solve, yeah. But such is the life of MH. I wish the hunt just went for a full week (Wild, but I’d dig it). Or that there weren’t as many answerbergs. But shit happens. I had a blast. And I loved the difficulty, so there’s that. I think it’s okay for a Hunt to have extremely hard puzzles sometimes; after all, it might be the only place to showcase them.

  • The Puzzle width. We’re by no means a “small” team or without our share of strong solvers. But seeing us time and again with less than 5-10 puzzles open was… sad. I personally LOVED the “drowning in puzzles” feeling of MH21 and hated the “1 puzzle width” of mid-MH22.2 But mostly, I just wanted our team to see every puzzle, even if we had no hopes of finishing. So seeing Reactivation block all the AI puzzles (with no way to get past that even artificially) was unfortunate.3 I’d like future solvers to see all of a Hunt, or at least, get the choice to.

  • The solutions. In this, I might be the tiniest majority ever in the puzzlehunt community. But I absolutely adore good solutions. I really loved how in depth Teammate 21 went with its solutions (link to “The Shooting Gallery” solution). I was blown away by QOPH having the most detailed solutions ever4. To me, Hunt solutions are at least 30% of the entire whole, and not an afterthought. Hunts should not cater only to those who already know how ‘Cave puzzles’ or ‘Cryptic clues’ or numerous other “regular topics” work, but also to those learning those.5 And the best way to do that, is solutions. I wish this hunt had better solutions.

  • The lack of Fish puzzles. Enough has been said about the initial puzzles or overall hunt being hard. I still think there ought to have been a full round (or an equivalent number) of puzzles being dedicatedly “Fish” or “Students” difficulty. Not every team is stacked with supersolvers, and seeing a new person get a “win” by themselves is amazing. I believe this is less a factor of “testsolve calibration” (something I know literally nothing about) and more “overall hunt design” philosophies. More hunts should actively “plan” for enough puzzles of this type.

  • Some puzzles. I did not enjoy grunt work on a few puzzles at all, especially when it came with no satisfying payoff at the end. Other puzzles, I thought, made the extractions extremely convoluted to try and make it “fancy”. I think there was scope for several puzzles to be “cleaner” and “more satisfying”, though I can’t say what it means for “setting” vs “editing”. Naming some (but not all) puzzles in the reference below. 6 7 8

No Spoilers - Things that could be “cooler”

  • The “cool rounds” being late heavy. I loved seeing Infinite Corridor as a first time team in MH21. As a middling-team person who loves creative tasks, I was sad to miss out on all of New You City in MH22. As a “slightly better middling team” this year, seeing Innovation on the bit late side, and practically not seeing Wyrm (link) or Conjuri (link) or Ascent (link) at all was.. sad. I wish the structure was thought through wrt these ideas more.

  • The Interactions. Mystery Hunt is hard to host, and teams have an infinite number of things on their plates. But one thing that stood out to me the most over the last couple years, is that teams have actual “interactions” with the hosts, which sounds hella cool. We missed out on having those in MH21 and I deeply cherished the ones we got in MH22.9 10 I was hoping getting past Reactivation would unlock something like that (It’s either 2/3rds or 1/2th of the hunt), but instead we just got another AI “interaction”. I wish we’d gotten humans. We eventually just scheduled an online check-up ourselves.11

  • A very minor thing, but hinting. We were waiting on a couple hints for about 40+ mins. That bottlenecked everything else that was waiting on hints. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else have trouble with hints, and I found all hint replies actually helpful though, so it’s just one minor blip in an otherwise flawless system, I hear.

  • Some QoL that I’d find exceedingly helpful, in no particular order12… Knowing which puzzle the ‘submitted hint’ is on. Getting more ways to communicate to the teams than “mail captains+team email id”13. Having a page that’s “All your known puzzles are always on this page”.14 Being able to navigate between rounds better.15 Here’s also a list of QoL that teammate nailed and I wanted to bring up… Knowing the exact time until the next answer submission. The colour picker thingy on puzzles with accessibility concerns. Copy to clipboard. Knowing exactly which puzzles were IRL.16

Some tagged Spoilers - Things I found awesome

Because of how I solved this year, I got to see a lot of puzzles (just not “deep enough” everywhere). So I’ll fangirl over quite a few puzzles (but there’s still a few puzzles I completely missed and/or puzzles we’ve yet to post-forward-solve).

  • The story and art. It was nice, it was pretty, it was fun. I’m not the biggest fan of the entire “vote for chat” interaction presented17, but enough folks in my team (and outside) really enjoyed them. It was a clever addition, and something enough people loved. I loved all the emojis this gave us <3 I loved the “feel” every round had, distinctly. These are things Teammate has done well before, and nailed very well this year.
  • The puzzle To Numbers and Back Again. As a native Hindi speaker/someone who can “read” Sanskrit very badly, this puzzle was “made for me”. I’ve often seen people talk about “This puzzle is about things I enjoy”, and I’ve been that person before. But this puzzle perfectly touched a LOT of “Oh hey I remember this thing from childhood” which was WILD. And above all that, it was just a good, very well made MH puzzle. It wasn’t a puzzle “about” Indic things, it was a puzzle that fully integrated them into mechanics. I “loved” how many hints the puzzle gave at different points (with flavour and messages). I love how much alphabetisation was done to make things confirming. I love the absolute diversity of the puzzle topic, because this one just dared to go “Oh hey, this puzzle is about Sanskrit, it’ll be deep, just buckle up”. It’s what I love the most about MH puzzles, and this one was just… really freaking good. This puzzle is among my top MH puzzles of this year, maybe even all time even.18
  • The puzzle Showcase. This was another puzzle “made for me”. The logic puzzles were good, I had fun, and the twist/reveal had me cackling. I have a special place in my heart for coding and ACM ICPC, so seeing it in a puzzle was really freaking cool. Even cooler was seeing how “integrated” the puzzle was, from using ICPC problems, to literally embedding things in the stream. I may not have solved much of the puzzle, but this was hype af, and I enjoyed every second of it.19
  • The puzzle Terminal. This is another puzzle that’ll very likely go into my list of “all time MH classics”, and possibly the only one where I 100% agree with the author making the puzzle “harder” for greater “Oh shit” impact. “Intricate puzzles with a simple mechanic”20 are my bread-and-butter, in that I absolutely love them when it pulls together well. This puzzle happened to do that, and was fun enough for it to be “Oh damn this was a memorable puzzle” for me.

  • The meta Factory Floor Meta : The Blueprint Just a super cool “Did they really pull this off” moment, and a meta that just brilliantly comes together. I think this is just a teammate staple now, an awfully constrained meta that somehow works despite all odds. I have extremely fond memories of Teammate 20’s capstone (link) as well as Teammate 21’s “Hall of Mirrors” meta (link) in the same vein.

  • The meta Mate’s Meta In the exact same category as the Factory Floor meta, just marginally less “mind-bendy”. In case it’s not obvious yet, I’m a sucker for “clean” clever metas, especially ones that constrain the feeders in interesting ways. This was not a “long” ‘meta’ (in fact, we destroyed it within 72 mins)21 but damn if it was not hella fun and satisfying. I enjoyed every part of the solve, and how we kept getting ahas after ahas on this.

  • The Meta of [REDACTED]hole Talking about the round itself is a spoiler, so off in tags you go. We postsolved all of it, and I enjoyed practically every meta of the Wyrmhole round (link), for one reason or the other. The Legend (link) was neat, and I particularly enjoyed attempting this in Sheets. The Scheme (link) had us OBLITERATE the meta (8 min solve time wooo! Fastest team by far, though postsolved). Lost At Sea (link) I practically solo-ed, pretty much nailing every single aha there was to be found. I’m very proud of our 90 min solve time (4th fastest booyah!) on this. Collage (link) is a super cheeky “This was a meta?” that I appreciated. And the Round meta Period of Wyrm (link) was just my favourite AI meta. The “real vs imaginary answers” aha was a major “Mind=Blown” moment, and I enjoyed all of the solve-path for this, even though my teammates carried me here. It was just a cool-af meta in a cool-af round.

  • World’s Largest Logic Puzzle This is the big Lotus puzzle of this MH.22 Another teammate did ALMOST ALL of the heavy lifting and solve on this, while I cheered and kept giving insights and trying to assist. It was extravagant, it was over the top, and it was beautiful. The insights just kept coming one after the other, there was enough scope to continuously make deductions there; but mostly… I just love seeing “This puzzle has multi-million cells, deal with it” as a puzzle category23 The solve was satisfying, and the puzzle was just having a perfect “cool” factor. I loved it.

  • Puzzles I really enjoyed (and worked on). Collage Instant “Get the whole team here” moment. It was suuuper fun, and an improvement on Word Wide Web from Teammate 20 (link) in every way. I love this puzzle category. Interpretive Art Another riot of a puzzle to figure out. It was just super hilarious all round. 10/10 would recommend. Flooded Caves I solved half of the cave puzzles, and they were nice. Another teammate was more of an “Isaac” fan than me so they did all the ahas. But the puzzle was fun, satisfying, and I really enjoyed the end.24 Graph It The puzzle presentation was simple, the puzzle solve-path was simple, and we ended up basically having one of our teammates solve it solo. But it was a clever puzzle (and I learnt something new) and kept giving us “Wait really, this works?” moments, which was cool
  • Other puzzles worth checking out. Inscription I’m not a cryptic guy, but I enjoyed doing the sheet formulae setup for my team to devour this one. It’s a really cool idea.25 Brain Freeze Once again, I assisted my team with the formulae setup to automate this. It’s just clever and pays off well..25 One of the puzzles of All Time This puzzle has no rights being as hilarious as it is. Hall of Archaeology Public access not available yet, but soon hopefully. This puzzle was very relaxing to attack with my teammates. Hall of Innovation (the entire round). I was not as involved, so no comments, but just a fun round. Tissues I enjoyed the ahas that kept popping up, and the “neatness” that rounded up the entire thing. Plus, I solved the logic puzzle at end, so clearly it’s a cool puzz Pixel Art My teammates did most of the work for this, and I just contributed sheet-formulae, but it was a fun puzzle that worked very nicely.25 Dispel the Bees “Simple” but fun puzzle, though I wish it wasn’t so unchecked. One of the classic “I know what to do, but it’s hard” puzzle. We took several tries to get it right, but it was cool.

An Aside about the AI rounds

I liked several of the risks taken by this MH, and found all the AI rounds pretty interesting af.

I’ve already talked about the round named Wyrmhole and why every single meta there clicked with me. It’s also a round which brought back fond memories of Nano Round from MH21 (link), and that’s always a good sign.26 The AI round named ABCDE was really cool in terms of sheer “Hahahha wait what” factor alone, but the round constraint necessarily led to some really cool solve paths for individual puzzles (specifically how the answer is formatted). The AI round named Conjuri, I found to be quite pleasing and fun, “reveal” and “presentation” wise. It was cool, and again, brought back fond memories of Perpendicular Device from MH21, so another good sign.

But the AI round I really wanted to talk about was Ascent, I personally think The choice for going for “Different language/culture” each puzzle was bold and inspiring. Some of the puzzles were not my style, but others I found myself gaga-ing over like crazy. Having mulled over this post for well over a week, I now realise that a lot of the puzzles this year I found “amazing” included a personal touch. Which makes for the camp I’m now on… “To be great, a puzzle doesn’t need to cater to everyone, as long as it’s someone’s favourite.”27 And based on reports, a number of puzzles this round were exactly that. Not necessarily all, but enough that I’m really glad this round came to be. And I think that’s why this round might be my favourite “innovation” of this year. So thank you, teammate.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m fairly happy with the MH, and a lot happier now that I got to return to several puzzles to talk about them. I had thoughts and strong feelings about a number of “overarching” things, but there were quite a LOT of puzzles that really delivered. Ergo, there’s more than a couple puzzles that’ll end up in my “Tim keeps talking about it all the time” list. And that’s enough for me to be really happy with MH22.

import references as rf

  1. I have been known to be a grumpy solver, so fair warning. I tend to talk on about things I do not enjoy more than the average person. ↩

  2. Incidentally, I absolutely absolutely loved the optional unlock using button of MH22, because it allowed teams to “not drown in puzzles” if they wanted, but see more puzzles if width was a concern. It was perfect if you were behind enough, as most teams end up. ↩

  3. In the end, we solved Reactivation 1 hour before hunt close, and slow-solved our way the next week. ↩

  4. Seriously, they’re so good that everyone should use them as their de facto “teach newcomers” tool. I just simply love QOPH solutions, even though I don’t expect other hunts to reach the same standards. ↩

  5. And maybe someday, I’d stop bifurcating on every logic puzzle and/or just throwing cryptic clues into google and praying. I solve this way, because it’s the only way I know how to do those, and I would like to learn more. Thanks to the size and “Anything goes” nature of MH, some of these puzzle types will show up in few other hunts, which imo, makes MH solutions even more important. ↩

  6. (Moral of the Story) I didn’t enjoy the core mechanic of this puzzle. The extraction was too long and painful for us. I wish we had a “bigger payoff” somewhere in the puzzle. ↩

  7. (Street Smarts) The extraction felt frustrating for me. “Some streets have 1 clue backwards” introduced ambiguity, which combined with the extraction method, forced you to find (practically) all locations. For a physical puzzle, this exacerbated issues (It’s easy to miss things, doublechecking is hard, grunt work is more painful, and teams will be limited in who can go around) ↩

  8. ([REDACTED]’S Request - The Meta) For the round, having one person make the “Hardener mistake” was an irrevocable penalty for the whole team. For the meta, I think the extraction was too convoluted. There were too many variables that could only be gathered by doing grunt work that took time and was fairly painful. I wish it’d just been simplified more so it feels less “needle in a haystack” ↩

  9. Had we missed out on them, some Palindrome members even promised to act out “interactions” using popsicles, which was the sweetest thing ever <3 ↩

  10. We got one “skit” interaction, and one “chatting as chill friends” type interaction. I loved both of them, but the latter even more. ↩

  11. I have now been informed that solving Reactivation earned you an in-person interaction. So either we were too late for it (an hour before deadline) or too online for it. Either way, :c I still kinda wish we’d gotten another chance to interact with Teammate earlier too, but this is good to know. ↩

  12. Yes, I know how much effort these take to implement. Or maybe I don’t, I still have not worked on a full puzzlehunt yet. But to me, the little QoL and “care” things matter almost as much as the “big picture”. I think hunts are about the whole experience, and not just the “Here be cool puzzles”, so any accessibility (and more) matter. ↩

  13. In our case, we lucked out because I was captain and almost forever online + Our team mail is shared across 4+ folks. But I don’t remember seeing any clean ways for any “communication” (A dedicated page for “updates”, or a “way to add more email ids”), so everything was bottlenecked on those two sources. ↩

  14. While there was a “List of puzzles” pages this year, the Museum page not showing Factory left us with a non-zero amount of frustration for our team when jumping puzzles. ↩

  15. I could usually figure out Museum to Rounds and mostly Museum to Factory, but Factory to Rounds or Factory to Museum often ended up being frustrating. To that end, I ended up just giving up and using the All puzzles page at all times. ↩

  16. For us specifically (Like 50 strong, but only 1 IRL solver for the entire hunt), this was a gargantuan life saver. We knew exactly which puzzles to focus on, and how much. ↩

  17. Or more specifically, I’m a fan of them but not as a substitute for full interactions. ↩

  18. Having seen non-Indic people struggle with the puzzle now, I wish they’d clued the initial steps of all subpuzzles more. Other than that, I really really love this. ↩

  19. Free nostalgia trip down memory lane… About 10 years ago, me and like 10-12 of us grew my college’s “coding culture”. We were decent, maybe even quite good, but we were only the “first generation” of coders from our very new campus. So participating in ACM ICPC (India Regionals) two years in a row was a big thing for me. We weren’t super “good” (and definitely nowhere near World Finalist/GM level most other puzzle-hunters seem to be), but we had fun, and we grew our “culture”. And it was later super hype when some of our juniors finally actually reached the World Finals. What I’m saying is… This puzzle meant something special to my heart, and I loved it for it. ↩

  20. Shout out to Math 1001003 from MH21 (now my 2nd favourite puzzle in this category) and Ice Fishing from ECPH, another excellent example. ↩

  21. This is something I’m actually very proud of, knowing that our team now has the “solving capabilities” to “locust swarm” a puzzle in ways I’ve mostly only heard of.28 Everything was getting worked at, at once, and somehow it all kept coming together, which just looked magnificent. Definitely a puzzling “core memory” for me. (And the fact that we were top-10 fastest to crack this meta doesn’t hurt). ↩

  22. It’s my self described term for “Puzzles that reveal more and more as you hack at each outer layer”. Nutraumatic from MH21 is my eternal favourite. ↩

  23. Shout out to Replication from MH16 and The World’s Tallest Cryptic from MH08, two excellent examples of this genre. ↩

  24. Though I HAVE played “Four Souls” (the Isaac board game), so technically I’m part of the fandom too :D Please completely disregard the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to solve this puzzle with just Four Souls knowledge, nor the fact that I didn’t know BoI was an actual separate game before this puzz. ↩

  25. I think I’m starting to notice a theme here lmao. Have I Flanderized as just my team’s “sheet formulae” guy? :P ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  26. I’ve solved 3 MHs live now (MH21, MH22 and now MH23) and postsolved three more (MH15, MH16 and MH20).29 Of these, absolutely no points on guessing which MH has been my favourite based on how much I talk about it. Spoilers, it’s MH21. Based off other people’s opinions, I think it majorly comes down to the “first” MH someone sees, because it’s the first “out of the extraordinary” hunt people often see; but I wager it’s also because of how much it correlated with my tastes30 and the personal involvement I had with that solve.29 Either way, it was just a GOOD MH that I will remember (for multiple reasons) for years, and therefore, also my personal yardstick to measure all future MHs with. So… There’s that. ↩

  27. I “think” but cannot confirm that this sentiment has already been spoken (in a Puzzlehunt context) by people more prolific than I. Regardless, it’s something I felt needed to be said. And after a very fitting and excellent blogpost by CJ Quines (about MH23 and how puzzlehunts are art), it’ll be remiss if I didn’t share my favourite monologue of all time, below.31 ↩

  28. Technically I have seen it once or twice, most notably when doing “cross-team” group solves with multiple supersolvers, or that one time I got to beta-test MSPH 21 (Technically a subset of the first). But it’s a feeling that “hits different” when seeing Cryptics or people I expect to be amazing anyway, versus “my type of puzzles” or “people I’ve been solving with”. ↩

  29. For some definition of the word “solved” anyway. My team solved all of these hunts, and I personally had different degrees of involvement with them. (Ranging from MH16, where I barely remember most of the hunt; to MH21, where I contributed to the solve of 80-90% of the puzzles). Some of these might be good MHs to attempt a solo-solve of, later, at some point of time, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. ↩ ↩2

  30. Or, from another point of view… How much of my “tastes” in puzzling were defined by MH21. ↩

  31. From Oathbringer, By Brandon Sanderson [Chapter: Epilogue] “All great art is hated, It is obscenely difficult — if not impossible — to make something that nobody hates. Conversely, it is incredibly easy — if not expected — to make something that nobody loves.” … “This makes sense, if you think about it. Art is about emotion, examination, and going places people have never gone before to discover and investigate new things. The only way to create something that nobody hates is to ensure that it can’t be loved either. Remove enough spice from soup, and you’ll just end up with water.” … “Human taste is as varied as human fingerprints, Nobody will like everything, everybody dislikes something, someone loves that thing you hate — but at least being hated is better than nothing. To risk metaphor, a grand painting is often about contrast: brightest brights, darkest darks. Not grey mush. That a thing is hated is not proof that it’s great art, but the lack of hatred is certainly proof that it is not.” … “The question becomes, how many people need to love a piece of art to make it worthwhile? If you’re inevitably going to inspire hate, then how much enjoyment is needed to balance out the risk?” … “I think, in answer to my question… I think it only takes one.” ↩