Now for the part of the game I was most stressed about: THE PUZZLES!!!!

Now, I have played many puzzle games, digital and physical.

But MAKE puzzles? Minimal to no experience. I am pretty sure the only experience I have had making any puzzles is the scavenger hunt I made for my 5 year-old niece and 1 puzzle I contributed to the game I helped make for the Cryptex Hunt one year (my main job was the narrative while the great Dan Egnor made the rest of the puzzles as well as the big hidden puzzle. You can check it out here!).

As I mentioned in the first post, making puzzles was my main drive for signing up for the Secret Santa project in the first place. Nevertheless, I was pretty intimidated.

Lucky for me, I had a few pieces in place: I had a theme (ghost hunting), I had a delivery mechanic (cassette tapes), and I had characters (2 teenage girls). I knew I wanted each “session” to be a different ghost hunting experiment. So that seemed like the natural starting place.

I started by making a list of ghost hunting experiments:

-Trigger Objects: An experiment involving putting an object in an isolated room to detect ghostly activity
-Orb Activity: Ghostly orbs captured in photos and video. Dust? OR SUPERNATURAL?!
-Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP): An experiment involving an audio recorder capturing ghostly voices.
-Electromagnetic Field Meter (EMF Meter): A device that tests
-Scrying: calling upon spirits using a mirror and/or water
-Ouija Board/Spirit board: used to invite spirits to spell messages
-Spirit Box: a radio with a frequency scan to detect EVPs
-Smudge sticks: wards off evil spirits
-UV light: Can reveal ghostly messages and/or presence.

And more! I then went through them for puzzle possibilities. The trigger object seemed possible as it involves small objects which would be easy to ship. I didn’t have time or skills to do video recordings, but maybe having orb activity in a photo was a possibility. EVP recordings was a must given I planned to record the story on cassettes. And the UV light also seemed doable and had a lot of possibilities for finding secret messages.

I also needed to figure out what exactly the puzzles were solving to. Initially I was thinking of having the puzzles reveal a bunch of messages, with the UV light puzzle helping the player to open a box that I would make. But there were a couple of problems with that. First, I felt that having the box open would be very cool, but had no idea what other discoveries people would make upon solving the puzzles. Second, I was having a problem figuring out why I would have a box in this story in the first place.

The latter problem was easier to solve. This box would be a gift from one of the characters to another! In fact, I would make it a birthday gift, and maybe the birthday card would have secret messages that would give the combination for the box!

But with this narrative development, I realized it would have to be the first puzzle. And I didn’t want my coolest prop to be the first one opened. And what would even be in it? And why give a box for someone’s birthday?

That’s when I realized the box would have a 4-digit combo. Maybe instead of making the box linked to one puzzle, it would be linked to them all, and each ghost experiment would reveal a different number of the combination. This would make the opening of the box the ultimate goal of the game. With that realization in place, I went about actually trying to think of puzzles! Over time I came up with 4 puzzles:

UV Light

The first tape would be the girl’s first session and would involve a UV light Anna, the big ghost hunting lover, bought with her birthday money. Becca, her friend, gets excited about experimenting with UV lights to find ghostly messages and jokes that maybe the ghost on the birthday card might have a message for them. If the player shines a light onto the birthday card, which is of a ghost saying “Happy BOO-thday”, they will reveal a message:

This is will be a shift cipher. If the player shifts the letters of “BOO” according to the message, they come up with the word “ONE”, which would be a number in the combo.

At this point as well, the player will hear on the tape that this is when Becca gives Anna a birthday gift of the box bedazzled with sparkly ghosts. Anna thinks they should try to use the box to summon ghosts, and thinks they could do so if they put something personal in there. This detail was absolutely an homage to my own childhood, where we would make up our own rules for this sort of thing all the time.

Trigger Object

The second tape would have the girls experimenting with trigger objects, which usually involves tracing an object such as a ring or a penny on a piece of paper, leaving it in a locked and isolated room, and coming back some time later. If the object has moved outside of the tracing, it could be evidence a ghost moved it. The girls do this experiment with a ring, and upon coming back into the room see that the object does indeed seem to have moved. Anna gets excited, but Becca is skeptical and picks up the ring, upsetting Anna who claims it moved at least an inch. The player will have a piece of paper with the tracing as well as the ring. If they move the ring into the tracing and then move it down an inch, they will see the image of the number eight.

Orb Activity

The third tape would be an orb activity experiment. Anna finds some old family photos and is convinced a photo of her parents has orb activity. Becca is very skeptical at this point, thinking it’s likely just dust. Jokingly, she folds the photo to make the couple in it kiss, which Anna of course hates. However, Anna thinks she sees something, and Becca agrees. If the player folds the photo inwards to make the couple “kiss”, they will see the orbs in the photo form the number four.

EMF Meter

At first, I wanted the final tape to be an EVP. But for reasons you I will discuss in a moment, that idea had to go elsewhere. Instead, the final tape is an experiment with an EMF meter. The tape has the girls in their school looking for ghosts. Becca is holding Anna’s latest gadget, an EMF meter, and is dubious about how Anna afforded it. Soon though, the EMF starts reacting in sputtered beeps. Becca think it’s a malfunction, but Anna is not so sure. If the player listens carefully and picks up on another clue, they will hear it is morse code that spells out the number three.

The Big Ask Why

The four puzzles were coming together, the narrative was coming together, but I was still struggling with some of the ideas. One night I was talking about my ideas to my friend, puzzle designer extraodinaire and insane troll, Errol.

As Errol listened to me talk about the cassette tapes, he brought up a question I had also been dreading but was trying to put out of my mind. “Wait…the sessions are just 2-3 minutes? So what’s on the rest of the tape?”

What…indeed. This was the question that had come across my mind but that I didn’t want to think about. And I still did not have a good answer for it. Why would two girls with tapes that could hold 60 minutes of audio only record 2-3 minutes per tape?

Errol had an idea, though. Why not, he posited, have music on the tapes. And in fact, maybe something could index to that music. He was not sure what, but it was an idea.

As it turned out, it would end up being integral to the puzzle design. Having music on the tapes would not only help build the 90’s atmosphere, but would also present a possibility for a final puzzle. This is where my EVP puzzle could go.

EVP Puzzle

The final tape would be just Becca. She is holding an EVP session, asking if spirits are there and after a couple of times doing this, would ask specifically if Anna is there, signaling to the player that something bad has happened to her. While this is happening though, a ghostly voice comes in over the tape, saying a single word: “Songs”. At this point the player can see in a final journal page (there are journal pages throughout) that Becca wrote down that she heard a voice, and follows it with a list of the tape sessions and songs. If the player then finds those songs on the tapes, they will hear a ghost come in during the song to say a single word. The messages are “1. Ring”, “2. EMF”, “3. Card”, and “4. Photo”.

Essentially, this would give the order of the numbers in the combo. This also solved my other problem of how to avoid the player just rolling the last number (I was actually going to make it a joke and have that be the last puzzle) and let me include a ghostly version of Becca in there. Upon opening the box with the newly discovered combo, the player would discover a final tape with a goodbye message from Becca saying she misses Anna, an obituary for Anna, and a photo of the girls at the age they would be at the beginning of the game. If the player shines a UV light on the photo they get a message of “I miss you too”.

And before I knew it, I had a basic puzzle flow! There were still some holes to fill. Why, for example, is there music on the tapes? Well, perhaps the tapes were initially mix tapes made by Anna’s sister. Kids don’t exactly have money or resources for all their hobbies and depend on their parents to indulge them. It would make sense that Anna might swipe her sister’s mix tapes to record her ghost hunting sessions, initially because she had no other choice but then later because, well, sibling rivalries. The other option was that music would be Becca’s contribution to the sessions, but the first reason felt more fun.

But once I had these basic ideas down, thinking of narrative reasons around them became a lot simpler. Writing it all down here, of course it all makes sense now, but really it was a good 3 months of me staring at a spreadsheet and wondering what the heck would I do. For me, nailing down the theme and narrative went a long way to helping with puzzles. Were the puzzles clever? Not really. But did they work? At the end of the process, I hope they did. How they evolved after I had the basic flow…well, that’s for another post!