The winner of MIT Mystery Hunt 2019, Left Out, brings in the buzz for a theme park!
In this MIT Mystery Hunt, the kick-off is an actual wedding ceremony among Mark Gottlieb and Gaby Weidling, who later set off to have their honeymoon at Penny Park. However, this park is in danger of closing due to low attendance, and the Loonie Toonies mascots got the teams to experience the park, fix the attractions, and generate buzz for the amusement park. They later encountered Penny and later learned that her grandmother Judy founded the park, but Penny tried and failed to put up experimental attractions. Eventually, the teams found an underground machine that can generate buzz so the park can be sustained forever.
The first team to do so, ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, got the honor of a pressed penny ... and the responsibility of hosting MIT Mystery Hunt 2021.
- Amusement Park: Penny Park serves as this, though is in danger of being an Abandoned Playground due to the lack of buzz.
- Continuity Nod: The puzzle "First You Visit..."
riffs on the prior year's infamous "First You Visit Burkina Faso". - Exposition Diagram: The metapuzzle "Director's Cut" contains a series of plot diagrams from various media that solvers need to assemble using the feeder puzzle answers ... which are emoji.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: Penny brought up experimental attractions of the park and tasked solvers to solving issues, and the experimental attractions ... experimented with the traditional puzzlehunt format. In particular, Creative Pictures Studios have all feeder answers as actual emojis, and Safari Adventure has a non-existent puzzle that still needs to be "solved".
- Hero Does Public Service: The teams are saving Penny Park from closure via generating buzz, but the Scavenger Hunt puzzle for that year is "Pay it Forward", where all the tasks are for various causes. Remote teams can substitute the tasks with similar causes in their local area.
- Say It with Hearts: Upon doing enough submissions for the charity-themed scavenger hunt, teams are rewarded with a flyer that said "All You Need is ♥️", fitting for the community service themed scavenger hunt. But for the actual puzzle submission for "Pay it Forward", that flyer is an indicator to submit the ♥️ emoji as the puzzle answer.
- Teamwork Puzzle Game: While all puzzles are encouraged to be done on team, some puzzles scattered throughout attractions required live cooperation and are labeled as TEAMWORK TIME. The term itself is later used to describe similar puzzles in later puzzlehunts.
- Unknown Character: The animals of Safari Adventure are represented as puzzles, and the metapuzzle talked about the tiger exhibit being too scary. Naturally, there would be a tiger puzzle for that tiger ... but turns out the tiger is not represented as a puzzle, yet solvers still need to get the hypothetical answers to the "Tiger" puzzle by backsolving from the other metapuzzles of that round.
- Wedding Episode: The kick-off of the puzzlehunt sets up for a wedding and is in fact an actual wedding, though the amusement park theming later subverted the trope.
