Metapuzzle

Solutions: ^note CRAYON, MINDS, TINNY, BREACH. Final solution: ^note NO CHEMISTRY.

A metapuzzle is a type of puzzle whose solution requires data or involvement from solutions obtained via other puzzles, thus acting as an overarching puzzle that is connected (whether directly or indirectly) to smaller puzzles and whose solution is the ultimate goal. It can often pop up in video games (usually puzzle games), but it's also possible to see them in other genres and media. It comes in many forms:

1. The Hub Level turns out to have puzzles on its own that require levels in it to be completed.
2. The puzzle requires you to manipulate several levels (whether the levels have been previously solved or only count as fully solved when the metapuzzle is completed depends on the case).
3. An individual level features individual puzzles and rewards the player who solves them with items or clues that are part of a larger puzzle whose solution is necessary to conquer the level as a whole.
4. Among the seemingly conventional puzzles tackled to clear a level, there is one that requires figuring out a step that cannot be derived by only accounting for the constraints of the level itself.

Puzzles of this type often require out-of-the-box thinking (and, if it's not readily apparent that a seemingly-solved puzzle will factor in for the solution of a greater-scope puzzle, it might even become a Moon Logic Puzzle).

The term was coined in The '80s by game designer Cliff Johnson, who has designed puzzles of this kind for various games he created. Etymologically, the name's prefix comes from the Greek: μετά, meta, meaning "after" or "beyond", and contextually refers to something that is "more comprehensive" or "transcending". Metapuzzles were used as early as during the nascent years of the popular Jumble crossword game, making this trope Older Than the NES. The concept of Metapuzzles became more common in The New '10s when its principles were extrapolated to puzzles in games of other genres. Due to its meta nature, it can be combined with several Stock Puzzles.

The metapuzzle may be presented as a form of Enter Solution Here, if its interface or format requires it.

NOTE: In the context of this trope, the prefix meta in the name refers to how the central puzzle connects to the gameplay and/or solution of all the puzzles that relate to it. For examples of puzzles that are called "meta" in the sense that they apply a nonstandard aspect of the game's UI or supplementary material, see Paradiegetic Gameplay (it is possible to combine both tropes, but it's a rare sight). It has no relation to Meta Game either, since that pertains to how a competitive community exploits the mechanics of a sports or fighting game, and more generally how people play the game(s) in question when competing (often with out-of-game rules and considerations).

Spoilers Off apply for this page, as most of the examples below will contain heavy spoilers!

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Examples:

• 3 in Three: After completing individual puzzles, you sometimes get random garbled text or a strange letter. After discovering what they really mean, these are all entered in the metapuzzle, Inside Track. Also an example of Enter Solution Here.
• Baba is You: After you unlock the top gate, it turns out that levels themselves can be manipulated and used as objects. Level icons themselves can be transformed into other objects that must be used to complete subworlds themselves. One level even requires you to manipulate objects outside the level in order to win said level.
• Braid:
  • In general sense, collecting puzzle pieces allows the player to assemble jigsaw puzzles. Assembling jigsaw puzzles themselves are needed to unlock chapter 1.
  • One of the secret stars is located in the house. To obtain it, you need to collect two specific puzzle pieces beforehand within the actual levels, and then place the pieces in the puzzle frame so that the shapes shown in them form a star: what makes it even harder is the fact that the configuration that causes the star to appear requires placing the pieces so that they're outside the piece outlines shown in the frame and once you place any of the pieces in their intended spaces, they can't be moved anymore.
• Completing levels in Block In The Lock unlocks puzzle pieces in the world map. Collecting enough of them allows the area puzzle to be completed, unlocking a new world.
• Can Of Wormholes: Aside from the regular puzzles, there's an overarching puzzle of navigating the hub rockets to connect to other rockets and access more levels, as well as some puzzles requiring the rocket to be bent at a specific angle to even enter, and the ending requiring getting all hubs into the wormhole.
• Deadly Rooms of Death:
  • Seeding beacons, introduced in The Second Sky, allow solved rooms to be toggled back to their unsolved state, re-closing green and blue doors that were opened by solving the rooms. The level "Seeding Grounds" uses this for a larger-scale puzzle where the state of several rooms has to be configured to gain access to a seeding beacon in another room.
  • The player role and (in The Second Sky) the player's weapon are controlled by global variables, so a metapuzzle can be constructed where the player has to obtain the correct player role or weapon in one room to use it in another. An example of this in usermade holds is the level "Shape Shifting" in Choose Your Adventure.
  • Usermade holds This and That have areas in each room that can be decoded, Puzzle Hunt style, into parts of a metapuzzle spanning both holds.
• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: There's an optional metapuzzle in the Bonus Dungeon (Hall of Darkness) that doubles as a Boss-Altering Consequence since solving it will give the player's character party a greater advantage when fighting the True Final Boss (whose room can be accessed with suspicious ease as soon as the party reaches the final floor). The huge maze that makes up for the last floor's layout has several navigation puzzles, which make use of assets and gimmicks based on previous dungeons as well as the earlier floors of the Hall of Darkness itself. As the characters work out their way through them, they find color-coded chemicals which are part of a powerful compound capable of weakening the Insatiable Pupa, but they must be inserted into a collectable canister in a very specific order. This order, in turn, can be figured out by gathering recorded hints that are also found in the last floor. The player is very likely to realize that the chemicals have been gathered in the wrong order; however, once they've fully explored the last floor and figured out the right combination order for the chemicals, they can discard the chemicals as initially gotten and re-navigate through the floor so the chemicals can be gathered again, only now in the correct order. With them stored in the canister, the party can head to the entrance to the boss's room to apply the chemical and prepare for the epic battle.
• The Fool's Errand: The game's progression is tied to the use of a storybook as well as a cryptic map, and revolves around completing chapters that make up the whole parts of the game (there are five parts in total). In each chapter, there are puzzles (known in-game as enchantements) whose solutions are carried over to the access of later chapters' puzzles, making it so the player can get extra bits about the story as well as clues to solve the aforementioned later puzzles. Wrapping up the solutions of all puzzles in the chapters of the currently-played part will lead to the logical resolution of said part's thematic riddle. This trope also applies to the game's sequel The Fool and His Money.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Metapuzzles are frequent in the game, and not only require hints from individual puzzles but also data and tips from the instruction manual. The ultimate motivation to solve them is to guess the correct Grail, which is preemptively randomized.
• I Wanna Lockpick: At one point, the player unlocks The Great Beyond. Levels in this area contain door salvage points that, when touched, will transfer the next unlocked door to the respective output area along with the player exiting the level. Later, omega keys are also introduced.
• Jelly Is Sticky:
  • Completing levels activates inactive jellies in the subworld and eventually the hub. Enough of them need to be collected in order to complete the metapuzzle to solve the subarea. In some cases, completing all the puzzles in the subarea activates additional insert jelly, used to access further puzzles.
  • Some levels in the subworld require puzzling in the hub area to get into them in the first place.
  • Eight introductory area and the main area require the player to manipulate level completion, often requiring manipulating restarting and undoing puzzles to complete.
• In JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain, the Music Hall door is a Jumble word puzzle, which you have to solve in order to get the password that will open the door.
• JumpStart Adventures 5th Grade: Jo Hammet, Kid Detective: The crosswords all have marked squares. Once you fully solve the crossword, the letters in the marked squares then have to be unscrambled to determine Dr. X's next target. However, the player only needs to solve the crossword. Jo will unscramble the name of the target by herself.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Snowdrift Station is a secret, unlockable location whose cave features a crystal switch puzzle. At their sides are branching paths that take Link to specific puzzles and obstacles, and when each one is solved Link will find an inscription stone providing a hint related to the order in which the switches have to be hit. Once all four paths are solved and the hints of their respective inscription stones are jotted down, Link has to work out the correct order to hit the switches in (and he needs to hit them with the Boomerang due to the very short timespan allowed to input the sequential hits). Hitting them in the wrong order, or a certain switch that is warned against by one of the inscription stones, will trigger a trap beneath Link.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Sky Keep, the game's final dungeon, not only features puzzles (or, in two cases, Mini-Boss gauntlets) in its individual rooms but also presents a metapuzzle involving the entire layout that is built upon said rooms. In some of them (including the lobby), there are lecterns from which Link can alter the rooms' placements by way of a 15 Puzzle. Since their respective entrances and exits are each placed at specific sides, Link has to work out the way from the room where he's currently changing the placements to another room with a lectern, so he can go there and continue adjusting the room's placements and ultimately get access to the rooms holding the fragments of the Triforce. The room themselves are thematically tied to all previous dungeons in the game, so there's also an All the Worlds Are a Stage component in the whole dungeon.
• A Monster's Expedition: Most puzzles in the game are constrained in a single island. However, the game has snowmen as bonus content. In order to get access to the islands with snowmen, the player has to solve puzzles involving multiple islands. Sometimes the solution require tactical puzzle resets and other shenanigans.
• N Step Steve: Some of the optional puzzles require Steve to enter the room in a specific way, sometimes by making an extra Steve in one of the other puzzles, or even to find how to get to the puzzle at all.
• Pandora's Box (1999): Across the playable cities, there are puzzles that contain the pieces of the Box of Pandora the main character received at the start of the game. When gathering at least four pieces, you can make use of them to find the tricksters that escaped from the box prior to the events of the game; and to capture each trickster, you not only have to solve more puzzles along the way, but also complete a special trickster challenge that is considerably more difficult to solve.
• Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: Besides normal solutions, most captures require manipulating bunnies to go to other levels and even other bunburrows.
• Pikmin 3: The Secret Files scattered in the areas in the game's Wii U version are part of a metapuzzle. Each of the five mainlands has two collectable Secret Files, for a total of ten. Each File, in turn, is located in a seemingly-unreachable spot that can actually be gotten into by figuring out a teamwork puzzle involving two or even all three playable Captains as well as the Pikmin led by them (for example there's a File in Garden of Hope that requires the three characters to use their, and the Pikmins', weight to manipulate a complex scale system and grab the item). Each File collected shows a number, which is part of a numerical password that is based on several factors (like the language version of the game played, the region the game's copy was manufactured for, and a random element related to the specific playthrough). Once all ten Files are collected, the player will learn the full password; they can then input it on a special Nintendo page that can only be accessed from the Wii U's Internet browser, unlocking one of several possible cutscenes related to Olimar and Louie. These Files are absent in the Switch version of the game, as they were replaced by traditional log entries and the aforementioned cutscenes are now unlocked by a different method, so the trope is averted in that case.
• Professor Layton, being a Puzzle Game that employs several types of puzzle-based tropes in its games, showcases this type of puzzle in some of its special minigames:
  • Professor Layton and the Curious Village: The Painting is a jigsaw puzzle where you have to arrange the pieces (not only with the correct placement but also the correct orientation) in order to solve it. Gizmo is a building puzzle where you have to arrange the pieces of a mechanical dog to build it. And Inn is a hotel-themed puzzle where you're asked to place several pieces of furniture and decoration to their corresponding rooms, whether Layton's or Luke's. The catch for these three minigames? The jigsaw pieces, the robotic pieces and the furniture are all gathered one by one by solving the conventional puzzles in the game. Therefore, you'll be playing these minigames over the course of the game while you solve puzzles so you can ultimately solve these as well.
  • Professor Layton and the Last Specter: The minigame Puppet Theater consists of a theatrical event where a puppet has to perform actions and gestures that are consistent with the events and situations of the story that is being narrated. These actions, in turn, are available for use by solving several puzzles located across London and Misthallery, so it's recommended to solve them in order to have a greater selection of actions before playing the minigame. Afterwards, the player has to figure out which action corresponds to each event over the course of the story and its chapters; this is important because the puppet's performance has to receive a perfectly positive review in order to win the minigame as a whole.
  • Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: The Picture Book is a minigame that constitutes the narration of a story. There are three picture books, in each of which there are sentences and literary passages that are missing due to the absence of certain words. Those words, in turn, are the names of stickers you gather by solving other puzzles over the course of the game. Since each sticker can only be used once (and the limitation is carried over to all three picture books, not just the specific page of the book where you're using it), you need to figure out the correct placement of the stickers (an unsuspecting player might think a certain sticker is meant to be used in the story of one book, only to realize later that it's for a later book's story); and ultimately, by the time you get all stickers, you'll have to check all stories and their passages to ensure a correct solution for each of them.
  • Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy has the minigame Dress Up. As with many other special minigames in the series (including the other two available in this very game), it is divided into levels, each one based on the dressing request given to Layton and Luke from a specific female character; the characters in question are Prima (Froenborg), Sonya (Kodh), Brenda (London, also Luke's mother), Amanita (Phong Gi), Miranda (San Grio), Scarlett (Torrido), Beatrix (Hoogland), and Mehri (Mosinnia). However, because satisfying the expectations of the ladies requires meeting specific stats and conditions for each (cuteness, formality, glamour, casual factor, etc.), the player is better off waiting until all requests are available and then working around the liberties and constraints provided by each, to they can know which specific clothing items need to be given to each girl or woman. And in turn said items are obtained as rewards by solving individual puzzles that appear over the course of the game, thus making it a threefold meta-puzzle.
  • Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy: The special minigame Ideal Meal operates in a similar manner to Dress Up from Azran Legacy. Over the course of the game, Katrielle and her friends obtain culinary dishes by solving puzzles. Then, in the minigame, she has to make use of these dishes to give the customers their ideal dinners. And since all dishes are usable for each of the eight customers and each dish can only be assigned to one customer at a time, the player has to work around the clues and lore provided by the customers and their acquaintances in order to ultimately satisfy all of them. It's the only way to fully win the minigame and unlock additional content in the postgame.
• Riven has three big puzzles that require visiting all four available islands.
  • The Fire Marble puzzle. At the top of a building lies a grid where you place marbles. The solution is the geographical positions of several domes on the islands.
  • The stone circle puzzle. In a cave stands several stones in a circle, each with a symbol. Finding the correct symbols require finding stone eyes in the environment and connecting them to symbols via sound and/or the shape of the environment around them.
• Squishcraft:
  • In order to even get to the different areas, the player has to manipulate the blocks in the world select menu.
  • One of the worlds introduces checkered areas which, when entered, turns blocks into levels themselves.
• Starseed Pilgrim: Playing the game will unlock more seeds in the overworld that can be used to access more areas.
• Stephen's Sausage Roll: Completing all the levels in the sub-area spawns a sausage in the main world. This needs to be manipulated somehow to get to the next area. Usually these puzzles are simpler than normal levels but they often teach new mechanics.
• System's Twilight: The game uses metapuzzles (usually based on logic and wordplay) to gauge the story's progression. The in-between puzzles that lead to their resolution are variants of classic puzzle games like Black Box and Sokoban. The solution for the ultimate puzzle is still difficult to figure out even with the obtained clues, however, as it's unexpectedly Paradiegetic Gameplay.
• The Talos Principle series have sigils that can be obtained by completing puzzles. Those sigils themselves are a puzzle element, being used as puzzle pieces to open some of the doors.
  • The Talos Principle has star sigils as bonus content. Many star sigils require the player to smuggle objects outside of a puzzle to another or manipulate camera angles and consider multiple puzzles at once in order to be collected.
  • The Talos Principle 2: Like the previous game, there are collectible Stars scattered in the overworld areas that unlock bonus content, in this case quotes from Prometheus, Pandora and the Sphinx and a Sequel Hook revealing that Athena discovered an anomaly outside of the galaxy that's been around since before the Big Bang and is apparently sentient and waiting for humanity to come to it. Less subtly in this game, each area has two statues that grant a Star on the solution. Prometheus statues require finding then chasing the spark, Sphinx statues show a picture with a clue to either the location of a lever (or multiple levers) or another puzzle in the hub, and Pandora statues have a beam Receiver on them that requires using items from puzzle rooms and outside of puzzle rooms.
• Understand, the X-? levels often have meta gimmicks:
  • 1-?: You are allowed to draw lines outside of the grid. This lets you avoid hitting more than one star in 1-?-3. It also allows you to get a star in 1-?-4 ? you have to touch the "end of this level" star that's otherwise used for navigation only.
  • 2-?: Its rules seem to be straightforward, but at one point you'll probably hit a grid without a circle and get stuck. The starting circle is located where your line in the previous sub-level ended. You have to find a "chain" that makes 2-?-5's circle appear ? if you end 2-?-4 in the top square, the equivalent spot on 2-?-5 won't get a circle because it's already occupied by a square.
  • 4-?: The level's gimmick is that the area covered by the line in each sub-level must be the same.
  • 5-?: Each number corresponds to a board. You have to enter and exit the number on the same side as you started and ended the corresponding board.
  • 6-?: The entire level set is horizontally "mirrored" around 6-?-4. When you draw a line in 6-?-1, you're actually drawing a line on a horizontally mirrored version of 6-?-7.
  • 7-?: After passing over a triangle, every subsequent move will make the whole puzzle slide 1 tile in the direction of the triangle. The last puzzle requires you to switch to windowed mode and adjust the window size to make it possible!
  • 9-?'s sublevels eventually hide the symbols completely, forcing you to draw lines and use audio cues to figure out where they are.
  • 0-?: You have to reproduce the shape of the levels on the level select screen that match the chapter number of the rule.
  • _-?: You have to find a path that works for every sub-level. However, note that you can use the same path in very different configurations, as you can adjust the length of the segments.
• The Witness:
  • While most puzzles in the game are self-contained to an area, or are entirely environmental, there are a few environmental puzzles that require manipulating line puzzles to complete. Examples include adjusting a mirror to turn cloud to a different color in order to solve one of the environmental puzzles.
  • One set of puzzles requires you to draw a path in order to create a path in the world to access more puzzles.

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Non-Video Game Examples:

• Batman Forever: Shortly before the climax of the movie, Bruce discovers via Bat Deduction that the seemingly-standalone riddles that were put to him by the Riddler were part of a greater-scope riddle whose solution reveals the identity of the Riddler himself. Namely, the hints given upon solving each riddle are numbers, which are associated with letters from the alphabet: 13 (from the first riddle) becomes M, 18 (combining 1 from the second and 8 from the third) becomes R, and 5 (from the fourth) becomes E. So, MRE, or Mr. E (as in Mr. E[dward] Nygma). It also helps that Mr. E is pronounced identically to mystery, which is synonymous with enigma and relates to riddle, further connecting the Riddler and Edward.
• Digital Fortress: The book has one for the reader to solve once they've finished reading it: The story is divided into 128 short chapters. After the reader finishes reading them all, they'll come across the last page, which contains a series of seemingly-disjointed numbers (16 in total). It turns out these numbers correspond to particular chapters, and the reader has to go back to them in order to jot down the first letter of each chapter's text (notably, the first chapter they have to go back to is the last one). When arranged in a 4x4 set, the letters can then be read from up to down (similar to how the story's characters had to read the letters of an 8x8 set during the climax in order to reach Tankado's final riddle) and unlock the following message: WE ARE WATCHING YOU.
• Blue Peter, during the 2000s, had an annual miniseries starring the various presenters. Each installment, prior to the last one, had a puzzle for both the characters and the viewers to solve; invariably, the answers to those puzzles then had to be put together in a certain way during the finale (for example, taking the first letter of the first clue, the second letter of the second clue, and so on) to obtain a vital plot-relevant clue.
• Crossword books sometimes have solutions that can only be derived when solving individual crosswords and riddles beforehand. British newspaper prize cryptic crosswords are particularly fond of this, sometimes with clues that hint at hidden words within the grid that give you further clues, that in turn provide you with the letters you need for a final answer.
• The SCP Foundation features SCP-2212, an article whose information is obscured by redactions and data corruption; the corruption can be removed by typing in specific passwords that can be gleaned from puzzles around the article. However, the file for SCP-2212 was never properly finished by the author, so the final puzzle doesn't work.
• Escape Rooms are often structured like this to prevent players from simply solving the last puzzle first and escaping immediately; for example, players might need to type in a certain sequence of numbers that can only be realized by figuring out all of the other puzzles in the room.
• Wikipedia provides the page image, using a set of Jumble puzzles which, when solved, give the letters necessary to solve a fifth.
• The sculpture Kryptos was revealed by its creator to contain a "riddle within a riddle" which could only be solved once the four encrypted passages it bore had been solved first (so far the 4th passage remains unsolved).
• This is the entire point of puzzlehunts. Solvers are given a packet of different puzzles to solve, and each one's answer contributes to the final metapuzzle. Among the more famous examples are Puzzled Pint (a monthly themed event that takes place at different bars across the United States), PANDA Magazine (a bimonthly metapuzzle publication), and D.A.S.H. (Different Area, Same Hunt, which takes place simultaneously in several U.S. cities).
• The MIT Mystery Hunt is considered the biggest puzzle event in the world. The Hunt is divided into multiple rounds; each round has its own metapuzzle, with the individual puzzles in that round (called "feeders") providing clues or information about the meta's answer. At times, figuring out the connection between the feeder puzzles is itself a puzzle (for example, all of the answers might have something in common, or hint at another form of code like Morse or Braille). It's then taken even further with the aptly-dubbed "meta-metas," which combine the answers from each round's metapuzzle into an even bigger metapuzzle that provides the final answer. Some Mystery Hunts have even had multiple meta-meta puzzles!
• Most Fictional Mystery, Real Prize works have this. For instance, in Masquerade (1979), the reader had to first solve the puzzles in the illustrations, then use the letters thus gained to derive the final clue, then deduce which location this clue was indicating.
• The standard format of a question on The BBC Radio 4 show Round Britain Quiz involves three to five clues and a suggestion as to how they might be linked. Work out what all the clues refer to, and then work out what else those words might mean that would provide the connection.

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