#constructed adventures

I know these images mean nothing without context, but I was so proud of myself for how this turned out. And these aren't even all of the clues! The whole thing was set on a train, and I had 4 different "tracks" that teams rotated between, and each track included about 4-6 different clues. Blah blah blah, I'll shut up about it lol.

The theater's haunted house will be a "lost in the woods" theme. Think dark forest, witches, mysterious park rangers, etc.

both of us agreed that the theming of the hunt was really striking - way more so than the average hunt. each round has a certain narrative idea to it, and with basically zero exceptions, every puzzle in each round ties into that idea strongly, such that when you remember a certain puzzle it's super obvious what round it was in. this was really nice because it actually felt like we were doing different, relevant things as the hunt went on - even if the actual mechanics of the puzzles are just, y'know, puzzle hunt stuff

for a while the puzzles felt pretty maximalist to us, like in round 1 especially a lot of the puzzles had a lot more detail than the actual mechanic (which was usually some simple cipher) sort of merited. and honestly although i understand why, given the puzzle hunt meta, you would use introductory content as an avenue to introduce ciphers to beginning solvers, i feel like ciphers don't actually constitute very compelling easier puzzle content - definitely doesn't have the same oomph as, say, now i know from galactic 2023

but halfway through round 2 and all through round 3, the higher difficulty stuff was definitely a lot better for that. a lot of this stuff felt really elegant and cool and the presentation wasn't overcomitting. i especially had fun with keeping up with the keychain, and the minimeta help me, chatomg! felt actually reasonable, rather than like omega crazy hard as minimetas usually are