Solution to The Tour
WISHING YOU MANY HAPPY RETURNS
The finale of this hunt — a metapuzzle that uses not just the answers but also the mechanics of all the individual puzzles — was presented through a 100-room text-based adventure game which whimsically traverses each of the preceding pop-up themes.
The first step of the puzzle is, of course, to play the game, and take careful notes along the way. As with all text-based adventures and dungeon crawlers, it’s crucial to draw an accurate map as you go along, such as the following colorful one a solver shared with us:
The labyrinthian path snakes its way through a 10x10 grid. 26 rooms contain interactions and the remaining rooms are completely empty.
Ah, that 26 might remind you of a few previous puzzles, and indeed, it again correlates to the English alphabet here. In each of these rooms, a recognizable mini-mechanic from one of the preceding 9 puzzles leads to each of the letters from A-Z, as follows:
Space Bar: The food item in the room contains initials which can be drawn on a keyboard to form a letter.
[52] Crispy Dry Eggplant Fried Til Golden Bubbles -> M
[85] Yellow Halal Nutty Jelly Items -> V
Foodstock: The speaker in the room is playing a song at a particular volume. Index into the food-named artist with the volume.
[7] "Push It" at volume 2 -> Salt-N-Pepa -> A
[69] "Bat Out Of Hell" at volume 4 -> Meatloaf -> T
Torus: The food item in the room has two words, and the O position in one word indexes the corresponding position in the other word.
[6] FISH SOUP -> I
[31] QUINCE OMELET -> Q
[88] STEAK GUMBO -> K
[89] HONEY SUSHI -> U
Gallop Pole: Eating or inspecting an animal in the room leads to a list of food ingredients, which can be aligned to make the name of a famous instance of that animal and all the same letter in another column.
[44] hot dog + “tofu, coffee, stuffing, and dogfish” -> TOTO -> F
[87] (nonedible) cow + “cornbread, bulgar, tabasco, brie, and tablesalt” -> ELSIE -> B
Sparvelous Moons: A phrase somewhere in the room alludes to the original Sparvelous Moons puzzle, and the number associated with them is used as an index.
[60] 9 short expression about interlaced netting -> MESH PHRASE / FRESH MAIZE -> Z
[61] 8 ladles with the costs still attached to them -> PRICED SPOONS / SPICED PRUNES -> R
[64] 6 cheerful and lively touches that make you laugh -> PERKY TICKLES / TURKEY PICKLES -> Y
[65] 1 nauseated printed multicolored fabric -> QUEASY CHINTZ / CHEESY QUINCE -> C
Sandwich Castle: The server in the room has a name. Use those initials to sandwich index into the food item in the room.
[2] Tony DiMario + BASTED EGGS -> E
[78] Ilsa Ellicott + APPLE CIDER -> D
[98] Olivia Talbot + OXTAIL SOUP -> X
Word Salad: Three items in the room fall into a category a la those in Word Salad. Take the first letter of the category.
[14] tortillas, avocado, gazpacho -> SPANISH -> S
[18] russets, reds, fingerlings -> POTATOES -> P
Goldberg Variation: A capitalized word in the room can be phonetically preceded by a letter to make a new word.
[9] EVAN -> ELEVEN -> L
[23] SURE -> ENSURE -> N
[24] PINE -> OPINE -> O
Red Herrings: An object or objects in the room allude to a particular cipher used in Red Herrings.
[34] river of whiskey -> NATO -> W
[51] 4 circular pancakes in a row -> …. in Morse -> H
[74] three herrings - no eyes, two eyes, then one eye -> 021 in ternary -> G
[79] clocks all stuck on 3:00 -> semaphore -> J
The other main piece tying this all together is the 10 preceding puzzle answers, including the PILCROW BAR from the original cocktail puzzle. Each is 10 letters long, and they can be ordered per the PILCROW BAR acrostic as follows:
P I L C R O W B A R
I N E E D A H E R O
L U C K Y G U E S S
C M D A N D C T R L
R O U N D R O B I N
O P E N S E S A M E
W O K A N D R O L L
B E N T S P O O N S
A L G O R H Y T H M
R E A D Y T O E A T
This grid can be overlaid on the labyrinth. Each row corresponds with a puzzle, so whichever row you’re in, use that puzzle’s extraction mechanic to interact with the objects or beings in that room. (This also helps clarify the ambiguity between the two answers which start with R.)
This grid is also used for the final extraction. Each of the 26 non-empty rooms yields a unique letter. But each of those rooms also maps to one of the letters in the grid above. Order the rooms by the unique set of letters they resolve to, and then read the other in order to get WISHING YOU MANY HAPPY RETURNS, a phrase you might hear as you leave the restaurant and one final allusion to our old friend the ¶ — aka a pilcrow, aka an alinea.
Notes
We received 3,101 correct solutions within the 8 day solve window. Here’s a graph for all our fellow data nerds out there:
We wrote the text-based adventure game in Inform 7 over the course of about 4 fairly sleepless days. The game is sprinkled with countless easter eggs, including a secret backdoor that we built for testing that we never removed: “warp to room [#]” allows you to instantly jump to any room in the game!
While writing the first couple puzzles, we hadn’t yet settled on a concept for the meta, but our first few answers happened to all be 10 letters long and start with letters in PILCROW BAR, so we continued this constraint for the remaining answers. We came up with the answer phrase MANY HAPPY RETURNS early on, and then later extended it to WISHING YOU MANY HAPPY RETURNS, which also totally by chance happens to be 26 letters long, leading to an obvious ordering mechanic.
In fact, our final answer was going to just be MANY HAPPY RETURNS for most of the development, simply because we didn’t have all the letters for the longer phrase. We got extraordinarily lucky to stumble on ALGORHYTHM, with its G and Y and two Hs, for the second to last puzzle, leaving us with just a Y and U missing and plenty of options for the 9th puzzle’s answer.
Our original thematic concept for this meta involved layering images of Alinea’s characteristic dessert table designs, but when we decided to involve the individual puzzle mechanics in the meta, we changed direction to a puzzle format which could more diegetically incorporate large amounts of text.
The authors apologize for the adventure’s inexcusable lack of grues.
Notes from solvers
We’d continuously ramped up the complexity of the puzzles throughout the game, and we aimed to write a meta that would both blow people’s minds and be a satisfying thematic conclusion to this 1.5 month project. It warmed our hearts to get comments like the following:
“Legendary meta-puzzle; Extremely satisfying to work through. Can't wait for whatever comes next.”
“One of the best metas I've seen.”
“Brilliant! My brain exploded a million times on this journey. Thanks!”
“What a meta! That was such a clever revisit of all the previous puzzles! I can't stop geeking out about it. Wow wow wow wow wow :D”
“This was dastardly”
“Unreal puzzles... great work to everyone involved! Truly epic, and truly memorable!”
“this is been one of the most challenging, exciting experiences i've ever had. this has helped me through the death of a loved one, my stupid job, and has even made my relationship with my girlfriend so much better because we had to freaking communicate and work together on these puzzles!”
“Thank you for these puzzles! Puzzlemaker is a new dream job for me, because of how clever these pop ups have been.”
“The best happy brain pain I could have asked for!”
“This has literally been the highlight of my 2020”
“Wow, gosh, I loved this. I really hope you guys do this again. This was a *spectacular* set of puzzles.”
“Slowly working through that last cypher, knowing it was going to work, felt like a victory lap. So satisfying. I can't thank everyone involved enough for all the fun and sense of accomplishment this gave me. I started with a group of friends. They all dropped out one by one, but I made it through to the end by myself. I feel like I'm at least coming out of quarantine better at something, and also slightly addicted to puzzles.”
“Loved playing these and finishing this last puzzle is like saying good bye to my favorite show at the series finale.”