This is the final puzzle in the hunt. Coming full circle, the flavortext is a callback to the intro meta, revisiting lyrics from the ‘Into the Woods’ prologue:
You wish to have the curse reversed?
I'll need a certain potion first
Go to the woods and bring me back
One, the cow as white as milk
Two, the cape as red as blood
Three, the hair as yellow as corn
Four, the slipper as pure as gold
In particular, in order to have the curse reversed, we need to go to the woods (revisit puzzles throughout the entire hunt) and bring back a bunch of things.
Revisiting puzzles, we find that exactly 12 puzzles’ contents have changed, where an emoji has now replaced a bigram in each puzzle.
The 12 emojis correspond to the things and colors in the lyrics above. Putting the bigrams replaced in lyric order yields how your story ends: you LIVE HAPHAZARDLY EVER AFTER.
| Puzzle | Changed Word | Emoji | Bigram |
|---|
| Black or White | flip | 🐄 (cow) | LI |
| The Bakery | convertible | ⚪ (white) | VE |
| Heroes | enchantments | 🥛 (milk) | HA |
| How Many Reps | echography | 🦸 (cape) | PH |
| Tales from a Dating Show | crazy | 🔴 (red) | AZ |
| Long Cube | Descartes | 🩸 (blood) | AR |
| A Rimer for Nitting | needles | 💇(hair) | DL |
| Candies and Stories | year | 🟡 (yellow) | YE |
| Three Parts | saved | 🌽 (corn) | VE |
| Characters | sheeran | 🥿 (slipper) | RA |
| Twisty Path | often | 😇 (pure) | FT |
| Around the World | meager | 🏆 (gold) | ER |
Darren: I hope solvers enjoyed this ending to the hunt! I wanted something that
- wrapped the story up cleanly
- made use of the “recursing” idea
- would be fun/interesting, but not too difficult/frustrating
- wouldn’t require too much dev work (given time constraints)
It took us a long time to settle on exactly how we wanted to write the endgame. (And originally we had ideas for a different kind of ending… of which I won’t name, in case we use the idea for future hunts.)
I really enjoyed the final puzzle of (hunt) REDDOThunt (year) 2022 and how it took (non-answer) pieces of feeder puzzles throughout the hunt and modified them in thematic ways. I wanted to do something similar here to tie into an idea of “recursing”: revisiting existing puzzles and cursing them in some way. (Another inspiration for me was (hunt) Puzzle Potluck (iteration) 3, which drastically changed the contents of previously familiar puzzles.)
Unfortunately, we (with the blame mostly on me) took too long to come up with something concrete, and this ended up being one of the last puzzles to be written in the hunt (and quite close to the hunt start date). This made it difficult to do something more involved with respect to cursing existing puzzles.
Ultimately, we added a slightly different spin on the idea of “recursing”, by primarily revisiting the ideas in the intro meta instead. We had the ending come full circle to the beginning, by revisiting the “Into the Woods” lyrics again. As a nod to the original vision, we still made some light modifications to existing puzzles throughout the hunt, though the “curses” didn’t end up being as interesting or drastic as I initially envisioned. I’m fairly happy with the current version, and hopefully it wasn’t too trivial (or annoying) to solve this.
Naturally, since the first meta was “Into the Woods,” I wanted to call this “Out of the Woods.” Sorry to disappoint any Swifties. In an alternative universe maybe we could have found a way to make a Taylor Swift puzzle work better here instead!
Big thanks to the devs who helped implement this puzzle, and to Dan (again) for helping me with brainstorming answers and ideas.