View Puzzle

Solution: Information Relay

Answer: FINISH LINE

Author: Benji Nguyen

Dev: Shuxin Zhan

The bears give clues in this Exquisite Froot game as follows.
  • 👨 Papa Bear: He doesn't understand how to play the game very well, so he gives terse, unhelpful clues that are technically correct.
  • 👩 Mama Bear: She gives one word that could go before the target word and one word that could go after the target word.
  • 👶 Child Bear: He gives game-related clues for the target word.
  • 👵 Grandma Bear: Mishears the word as a homophone (nonsensical or otherwise) and gives clues for that homophone.
  • 👴 Grandpa Bear: His clues aren't helpful for the target word, but will be needed for extraction.
What6-letter
word👵 dark
👵 time👩 white
👩 errant👶 horsey
👶 L👴 sweet
👴 (ish)👨 tough
👨 guy?
Answer: KNIGHT
What5-letter
word👩 hair
👩 detector👨 hard
👨 stuff👵 honor
👵 prize👶 gear
👶 slug👴 bored
👴 earring?
Answer: METAL
What6-letter
word👩 iron
👩 room👶 nuclear
👶 roguelike👴 per
👴 scenes👵 having
👵 tossed👨 nice
👨 seat?
Answer: THRONE
What5-letter
word👴 ba
👴 roar👵 spend
👵 each👩 wall
👩 tiger👨 soft
👨 stuff👶 roshambo
👶 two?
Answer: PAPER
What5-letter
word👨 more
👨 money👶 FF
👶 revival👴 Q
👴 weegee👵 destroy
👵 bulldoze👩 fund
👩 hell?
Answer: RAISE
What8-letter
word👶 earthbound
👶 lucky👴 seeks
👴 for👨 yummy
👨 stuff👩 knuckle
👩 between👵 desert
👵 magician?
Answer: SANDWICH

If you extract the numbered letters above each question, you get the following message:
HOW NANA HEARS GRAMPS

This implies that you should interpret Grandpa's clues as if you were Grandma -- namely, trying to find homophones. Grandpa's clues read as follows:
SWEET (ISH) BORED EARRING PER SCENES BA ROAR Q WEEGEE SEEKS FOR

You can reinterpret this (with help from the sentence enumeration at the bottom of the puzzle) as:
SWEDISH BORDERING PERSON'S BAR OR QUEUE, E.G. (SIX FOUR)

A Swedish bordering person might be a person from Finland, and their bar or queue might be a line. From this, you get FINNISH LINE. If you reinterpret this again as a homophone, you get FINISH LINE, which fits the enumeration and is the answer to the puzzle.

Authors' Notes

This game is a reference to Exquisite Fruit, a game I first learned at a National Puzzlers' League convention. It's derived from an old art game called exquisite corpse. The internet informs me it was invented by Todd McClary, so shout-out to him.

For this puzzle, I set out to design something relatively easy since this was going to be the final unlock of the intro round. If I were to tune this first part to be a bit harder, I'd make Child Bear's mechanics a bit more opaque or change his category so it's not as Google-able. I'd maybe also come up with a version where clues for the rules aren't given at the beginning. I intended for the meat of this puzzle to be about sussing out how the bears operated and sorting who's who within a question.

I like the final idea of this puzzle to be about how the Grandma Bear is able to make sense of the Grandpa Bear's unintelligible nonsense.

I tried to pick out Grandpa words that you could still force into the right clue phrase without too much straining without making the last step too obvious. Some of the parsing is a bit tricky as a result. Based on the number of hint requests that this step alone generated, this was probably a bit too hard. In retrospect, I probably should've just given an enumeration of the final phrase instead of the blanks. We ended up sending this out in a lot of the hint requests. The parsing was solved cleanly in multiple test sessions, so I hadn't considered making an enumeration (the blanks themselves were a last minute addition I had just thought of), but this was still harder than I'd like for an intro puzzle. I think forcing "ba roar" and "cue weegee" to be two words (and, in the latter case, an abbreviation) ended up being very tough, and the faux homophones weren't super precise either.