Category: Opinion (Page 1 of 21)

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: The MIT Mystery Hunt as Puzzle-Based Spectacle

March 31, 2026 / Michael Andersen / 2 Comments

MIT Mystery Hunt 2026’s mascot “The Child”, an extra-dimensional Puzzle Monster (PuzzMon)

It’s January 16th, and I’m sitting in a classroom on the MIT campus. Hours earlier, I joined thousands of puzzlers attending a paranormal research conference called CRYPTIC, where an intrepid researcher named Burnham proved that cryptids do exist…but in the process, opened up a rift to another world that threatened our very existence. The only way to close the rift and save the world: befriend that world’s puzzle monsters (PuzzMon) to save the world. This is the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle event that attracted over 5,000 puzzlers to spend a long weekend tackling a series of wildly creative puzzles.

Shortly after the conference, the PuzzMon.world website went live. By the time the evening rolled around, our team had already solved a handful of puzzles. I had just come off working on a puzzle themed around fanfiction tropes and the Omegaverse, and took a break from puzzles to explore the world of PuzzMon through a fully playable 16-bit video game world to unlock more puzzles for our team.

All of a sudden, two teammates settle down at my table and dump a box of black jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table, and start slowly matching pieces. I ask them what they’re working on: they explain it’s a puzzle called Starry Night. This is more interesting than what I was working on, so I drop everything and join them. Curious, I ask: “our team was given a set of two blacklights in our team’s welcome kit…do you think there’s secretly UV ink on the puzzle?”

Starry Night, under a blacklight – the otherwise black jigsaw is easier to assemble under the right light

My suspicion was correct: there was secretly UV ink on the puzzle pieces, and under the right lighting the puzzle is much easier to complete. In under an hour we have a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle, covered in ultraviolet stars and astrological signs. But that’s only the first step of the puzzle, and for the next hour or so we would try and figure out how to connect the dots to transform those hidden symbols into a word or phrase that is the final solution to the puzzle.

Puzzles at the MIT Mystery Hunt can take just about any form, so over the event’s 45 year history the teams running the event have used it as a platform to push the limits of what a puzzle can be. And because the prize for a team winning the MIT Mystery Hunt is the responsibility for running the next year’s hunt, every team has a slightly different answer to what that spectacle entails. For 2026, the puzzles themselves served as center for the spectacle. But be warned, as this article will spoil puzzle mechanics of a number of puzzles for those looking to solve after the fact.

The Immersive Side of Hawkins: From Scoops Ahoy to WSQK Radio

January 4, 2026 / Michael Andersen

A photo-op at the Stranger Things Experience in NYC: an immersive activation by Fever

The final episode of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix on December 31st, allowing fans of the series to say goodbye to one of the platform’s biggest hits before ringing in the new year. But that wasn’t the final transmission from the franchise: for the past six weeks, the UK company Global had been operating the in-universe radio station WSQK: The Squawk as a live broadcast, and the station had one final broadcast to get through before going dark due to “transmission problems”.

Stranger Things leaned in to the story’s 80s nostalgia to engage in an aggressive list of brand partnerships over the years, and many of those partnerships took a decidedly immersive turn. So while it’s worth exploring what six weeks of radio broadcasting looked like for Stranger Things fans, this also marks an opportunity to reflect at the show’s immersive history.

WSQK The Squawk: Radio Hawkins with “Global” Reach

Partners in workplace crime Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley worked at quite a few jobs over the course of Stranger Things: they became friends at the mall ice cream shop Scoops Ahoy for season 3 before switching over to Family Video to enter the video rental business in season 4. The premiere of season 5 saw the pair taking over programming at Hawkins’ local radio station WSQK, completing the nostalgic career trifecta.

Leaning in on that nostalgia, the UK broadcaster Global partnered with Netflix to produce six weeks of content broadcast to coincide with the show’s release. Every few hours a radio bumper does remind listeners that WSQK was presented by Stranger Things, but for the most part the programming is presented as authentically as possible.

In an interview about the project, Global stressed to Rolling Stone how seriously they took getting the sound right, noting:

“Most music and sound-design elements came from genuine pre-Nineties libraries like Bruton; anything newly created was shaped to avoid anachronism. ReelWorld dissected classic American jingle packages and rebuilt them to sound as though they’d aired on a Midwestern station for decades. Modern analog-emulating plugins were used sparingly and intentionally, then remastered through a final signal chain before broadcast.

For true period accuracy, the on-air signal passes through a vintage Inovonics FM250 processor — the same model found in thousands of U.S. stations in the mid-Eighties.”

And while the focus of the broadcasts are solidly fixed on playing classic tunes, a number of interactive segments help the show come alive like Mindy Flare’s “Rewind at 9” segment that tested listeners with song identification challenges. “Talk With Tammy” invited listeners to ask for advice, while “Dial A Dedication” allowed listeners to send in messages to the show’s request line.

A Light Narrative, From an Alternate Version of Hawkins

There’s even a loose narrative that ties together the broadcasts of on air disc jockeys Vance Goodman and Mindy Flare, leading to the station’s eventual shuttering. In the lead-up to New Year’s Eve, news segments start mentioning the radio tower’s signal has started to cut out, providing updates on the station engineers’ efforts to fix it. On January 1st, realizing the station would be going offline for good, the pair offer a heartfelt farewell that manages to namecheck a frightening number of 80s hits.

Because of those engineering troubles the station is canonically offline now, but a fan archived the broadcasts, allowing for segment-by-segment replays on their website.

The King in Yellow as Found Footage Minecraft ARG

November 17, 2025 / Michael Andersen

The yellow doors at the end of the “Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist” ARG

“Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left. Don’t be fooled. It’s listening.” This is the strange message that a Minecrafter named AVeryLargeMayo (“Avery”) discovered inside a book in his Minecraft instance. At the end of the book, there’s a cryptic cipher that Avery doesn’t know how to solve. So, he makes a video asking the internet to help solve the mystery for him. All told, the video is less than four minutes long. Which makes the 40 minute long video the YouTuber the Minecraft YouTuber Wifies makes unpacking his discoveries exploring the Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist ARG all the more impressive…even if he is secretly the game’s creator. And it’s that clever incorporation of the “ARG Explainer” video format as part of the ARG’s content that makes this Minecraft ARG so fascinating.

At least on the surface, this alternate reality game is handed to viewers as a fully-solved and crisply edited package, explaining (almost) everything and leaving little to the imagination. And yet, there is still considerable value in going to the “source material”, as none of the game’s three narrators are fully reliable.

Unlocking the First Layer: An Introduction to D3rlord3
The puzzle that Avery presents as the initial call to action in his video remains unsolved, at least at the beginning of the video: it doesn’t quite work as alphanumeric cipher, and similar attempts to treat it like a book cipher are quickly thwarted. Instead, Wifies falls down the rabbit hole by examining an inventory menu that flashes briefly onscreen during Avery’s video…a glitch in the system.

Wifies discovers that taking the first letter of each inventory item (and capitalizing the letters if there’s more than one of the item in the stack) spells out the location of a Google Drive link. So, the first image of a light block would be the number “1”, the three zombie heads in the second slot would become a capital “Z”, and the vine in the third slot would become the letter “v”.

When Wifies checks the URL, he finds the Google Drive link contains three files: two of these files are ~100 minutes of “raw” footage of someone playing Minecraft, and the final file is a PDF of an info doc from an anonymous Minecraft player, noting that the videos represent their “exploration into a strange tunnel I found in my minecraft world.” The rest of the video is Wifies’ account of what he uncovers through those video files from a user we’d later learn goes by the username D3rlord3.

Translating a Minecraft inventory into a website URL is infinitely easier when you made the puzzle

Notably, this is only a puzzle that works when explained in retrospect: the numbers could have just as easily represented indices into the words, and interpreting the blank space as underscore presumes that the solution will be a Google Drive link. But since this is a puzzle constructed to be presented as solved, none of that matters. The link wouldn’t even need to exist, since Wifies helpfully explains everything you’d need to know about its contents.

And yet, the Google Drive link does exist. You can watch the full 100 minutes of D3rlord3’s exploration. AveryLargeMayo’s channel also exists, so you can confirm the secret message is present, and watch him win at a game of SkyWars.

Stephen Sondheim Loved Puzzles More Than You

November 3, 2025 / Michael Andersen

Image of the custom Ouija board from Midnight Madness 2025, photo by Chase Anderson

It’s Saturday evening. A team of six puzzlers have spent the past five hours traveling across New York City for a hunt, and just decoded a sequence of responses from a custom Ouija board: the answers to the thirteen questions they had just asked spelled out GPS coordinates to a nearby office complex. Upon arriving at their destination, they rush past the Alamo Drafthouse to reach their next destination: a non-profit filled with vibrantly decorated pianos, arranged in rings of four. Multicolored stickers adorn several keys on each piano, practically begging to be played. And identifying the songs they’re about to perform is only the first step.

This experiential snapshot was from the charity puzzle event Midnight Madness. Famed composer and playwright Stephen Sondheim was not directly involved in the creation of this hunt, and none of his songs were featured in the puzzle that unfurled as teams tickled the ivory. And yet, as Barry Joseph argues in his new book Matching Minds with Sondheim, that event (and many more like it) might never have happened had it not been for Sondheim’s passion for puzzling.

Joseph makes an incredibly compelling case, tracing Sondheim’s influence through everything from puzzle hunts and cryptic crosswords to escape rooms and even board games. The book highlights how the puzzles and games that Sondheim created as intimate gifts for friends, family, and colleagues shaped the modern puzzling landscape.

A copy of Matching Minds with Sondheim, along a puzzle bookmark mirroring a Sondheim puzzle

In Good Company: Sondheim’s Surprising Puzzling Cameos

Much of the thrill of Matching Minds with Sondheim comes from learning how deeply embedded Sondheim was across early puzzling communities. Fans of Sondheim’s musicals might be surprised to learn that he moonlit as New York magazine’s first puzzle editor, starting with the magazine’s launch in 1968. During that tenure, he helped popularize the cryptic crossword format to American audiences, simplifying elements to be more approachable. And while Broadway fans may have been familiar with his longtime friendship with fellow composer Leonard Bernstein, the fact that he created a series of three narratively linked board games known as The Great Conductor Hunt to celebrate the man’s 50th birthday is less publicized.

Even Sondheim’s Broadway casts were enlisted into his puzzling fun. For decades up until his death in 2021, cast members would receive puzzles as elaborate opening night gifts…from custom engraved beans bearing a message of thanks for Into the Woods, to jigsaw puzzles with the recipient’s initials etched into the pattern.

Whether your puzzling passion leads you into the realm of video games (he was an avid fan of games like Myst), puzzle boxes (he had an extensive collection) or game shows (Sondheim spent years trying to hunt down a clip from his highly successful appearance on the game show Password), Matching Minds showcases Sondheim’s deep and abiding love for play.

Each of these forays into puzzles and games showcases a man infatuated with the many ways puzzles and games can spark creativity and inspire passion. In terms of puzzling tomes, I turn to AJ Jacobs’ The Puzzler as a tour of passionate puzzling communities. But Matching Minds with Sondheim may be my new reference book for showcasing why someone might fall in love with puzzles in the first place. And that celebration shines brightest (especially for ARGNet readers) in Barry Joseph’s section on treasure hunts, and The Murder Game.

Ministry of Lost Things Delivers a Box of Puns with a Side of Puzzles

October 19, 2025 / Michael Andersen

Ministry of Lost Things Lint Condition, next to the newest installment Finders Keypers

Last year, ARGNet reviewed the first installment in PostCurious’ episodic puzzle series, The Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition. The series of puzzle games center around the “Elusiverse”, a world filled with the lost and forgotten objects from our world enter when they’re misplaced. The crowdfunding campaign ultimately invited over 4,000 backers to join the Department of Returns as scouts, looking to return lost objects of sentimental value to their humans.

PostCurious is back crowdfunding for its second installment of the series, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keepers. The newest release is just as whimsical and lighthearted as the last, and packed full with so much wordplay, you could almost be excused for thinking the game’s dozen or so puzzles were just an excuse to inflict a series of tortured puns on players.

The gneesters, who happily rehome lost objects into the Elusiverse…even if means a lot to you

A Surprisingly Heartfelt Story for a Relatively Tiny Box
With the first installment of Ministry of Lost Things, finding out what object went missing was an element of the first puzzle. For Finders Keypers, things start out with a more explicit task: Cary the Carabiner ended up detached from her owner Jenna’s bag, and all of the keys she was securing became scattered. As a scout for the Department of Returns, it’s your job to traverse the Elusiverse collecting witness statements and solving puzzles to find the lost objects, learning along the way why they’re more than just keys to Jenna.

And every square inch of that heartfelt story is packed with more puns than you’re prepared to handle. One of the game’s early puzzles does a particularly good job of exemplifying this: starting off in The Keys (a location initially teased in the game’s first installment), Department of Returns scouts are tasked with tracing down the carabiner’s path through a series of islands that weaves through “Rock” and “Hard Place”, past “Key Largo” and its nearby counterpart “Key Smaller”, and past a series of islets like “Doss Isle, Grocery Isle, and Rept Isle”.

Early puzzle components from Ministry of Lost Things (some pieces omitted to prevent online solving)

If your reaction to that map is more of a chortle than a wince, this is the game for you since that’s the type of whimsy that saturates every part of the game, whether it contributes to the puzzle solving or not. There may be a dozen puzzles to this game, but there’s easily over a hundred literary flourishes, making this just as much a pun-laden successor to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels as it is a puzzle game.

I’m Obsessed with Emerald Echoes’ Narrative Hint System

July 19, 2025 / Michael Andersen

PostCurious’ newest narrative puzzletale Emerald Echoes, on Kickstarter through August 2025

PostCurious has a new narrative puzzle adventure called Emerald Echoes crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with the campaign running through August 14th. In many ways, it’s a classic PostCurious game: a series of moderately difficult puzzles strung together to tell a heartfelt story, drawing upon thoughtfully constructed game components designed to draw you into the narrative.

But the reason I’m currently obsessed with Emerald Echoes is how the game reinvents PostCurious’ already strong hint systems, taking the game fully offline in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

Three of the four chapters from Emerald Echoes, delivered in narratively relevant envelopes

Emerald Echoes Finds Puzzlers Returning to the World of The Emerald Flame
Emerald Echoes is framed as a sequel to one of PostCurious’ earliest games, The Emerald Flame. The first game in the series followed Marketa’s research into an alchemical elixir and the often strained relationship that blossomed with Hannah, as told from the player’s perspective as a Koschei Historical Society researcher poring over letters and artifacts from the time in the modern day.

Emerald Echoes picks up where Emerald Flame left off, as people who have come to care for Marketa try and retrace her steps and find her after the events of the first game: a story that is once more told through the perspective of researchers investigating archaeological findings.

Notably, this is a standalone sequel: I played this with a friend who had never played the first installment, and the story still made sense without context from Hannah and Marketa’s prior adventures, although there are the occasional light nods to prior events.