Solution: The Dating Sim

This puzzle was developed using the RenPy visual novel engine. Thanks to the RenPy team!

The puzzle involves "dating" five mysterious figures. Unfortunately, Paper Luigi doesn't have much of a chance to get to know them before he is forced to choose a date.

Good conversation is important to the success of any date, so the first step is picking the answers to your date's questions that fits with the topic:

Figure	Question	Topic	Choice	Choice	Choice	Choice
1	1	Philosophical school	Reductionists	Interpol	Mattachine Society	Rat Pack
1	2	Line of latitude	Exosphere	Debye Radius	Equator	Heaviside Layer
1	3	Disney songs	Everlong	Honor to Us All	Red Balloon	Rock Around The Clock
1	4	Defunct magazine	Instyle	National Geographic	Good Housekeeping	Teen
2	1	Barn activity	Ice Skating	Mountain Climbing	Napping	Equestrian
2	2	Henry James books	Our Man In Havana	The Will To Believe	Daisy Miller	High Fidelity
2	3	Moscow landmark	Elbrus	Lena Pillars	Peterhof Palace	Epiphany Monastery
2	4	NYC landmark	Holland Tunnel	Fountain Of Four Rivers	Uluru	Liberty Bell
3	1	Umami flavorings	Ugli	Dashi	Salt	Eggs
3	2	Rappers	Lana Del Rey	Iggy Azalea	Elvis Presley	Sade
3	3	Game systems	Neo Geo	Super Soaker	Power Hour	Apache Cassandra
3	4	Impossibilities	Regiomontanus' Problem	Towers Of Hanoi	Is there a positive integer solution to the Diophantine equation x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2	Stable Marriage Problem
4	1	Knots	Don Knotts	Oval Of Cassini	Ninotchka	Underwriter's Knot
4	2	Documentaries	Thin Red Line	Man On Wire	Ugetsu Monogatari	Scenes From A Marriage
4	3	Industrial revolution inventions	Gas Lighting	Electric Cars	The Wheel	Helicopter
4	4	Musicals	Everyman	Sizwe Bansi Is Dead	Next To Normal	Equus
5	1	Legends	Impossible Burger	Great Gatsby	Chupacabra	Norman Mailer
5	2	Geometric theorems	Optical Sine Theorem	Theorema Egregium	Rolle's Theorem	Equipartition Theorem
5	3	Basketball strategies	Pistol Offense	One-three-one	Long Ball	End-to-end Encryption
5	4	Mathematical constructs	Atomium	Koch Snowflake	Schrodinger's Cat	Edgeworth Box

The first letters of the wrong answers spell IMREDHERRING, IMNOTHELPFUL, USELESSPARTS, DONTUSETHESE, and IGNOREPLEASE to indicate their irrelevance to solving the puzzle.

If you are able to hold least three successful conversations, the identity of the mysterious figures are revealed:

Figure	Shape
1	Sphere
2	Cube
3	Tesseract
4	Plane
5	Tetrahedron

After arranging the correct answer in the grid at the end of the game, the first letters spell the clue phrase REDUCEDIMTHENGOTHINK:

Question	Figure 1	Figure 2	Figure 3	Figure 4	Figure 5
1	Reductionists	Equestrian	Dashi	Underwriter's Knot	Chupacabra
2	Equator	Daisy Miller	Iggy Azalea	Man On Wire	Theorema Egregium
3	Honor to Us All	Epiphany Monastery	Neo Geo	Gas Lighting	One-three-one
4	Teen	Holland Tunnel	Integer solution to x^n + y^n = z^n for n > 2	Next To Normal	Koch Snowflake

This is an instruction to first reduce the dimension of the figures. Then, contained in the dialogue of the game where Paper Luigi is thinking are words that when combined with the flattened shapes is an alternate answer to the questions in the game.

Those alternate answers match the given enumerations, which extracts the phase answer GENTLEMAN MEDAL.

Figure	Question	Topic	Alternate Answer	Extracted Letter
Sphere	1	Philosophical school	Vienna Circle	A
Cube	1	Barn activity	Square Dancing	N
Tesseract	1	Umami flavorings	Stock Cube	S
Plane	1	Knots	Bowline	W
Tetrahedron	1	Legends	Bermuda Triangle	E
Sphere	2	Line of latitude	Arctic Circle	R
Cube	2	Henry James books	Washington Square	G
Tesseract	2	Rappers	Ice Cube	E
Plane	2	Documentaries	The Thin Blue Line	N
Tetrahedron	2	Geometric theorems	Triangle Inequality	T
Sphere	3	Disney songs	Circle of Life	L
Cube	3	Moscow landmark	Red Square	E
Tesseract	3	Game systems	Game Cube	M
Plane	3	Industrial revolution inventions	Assembly Line	A
Tetrahedron	3	Basketball strategies	Triangle Offense	N
Sphere	4	Defunct magazine	Family Circle	M
Cube	4	NYC landmark	Times Square	E
Tesseract	4	Impossibilities	Doubling the Cube	D
Plane	4	Musicals	A Chorus Line	A
Tetrahedron	4	Mathematical constructs	Pascal's Triangle	L

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Author’s Notes

Our main concern when constructing this puzzle was to make sure the solve path was illuminated enough to prevent solvers from being lost. Our original model for the dating sim puzzle was a lot more complicated and involved Paper Luigi going on a series of dates with more complicated branching structure that required multiple replays and route-jumping to work out the solution... In any case, we decided to distill things down considerably and keep the solve path relatively simple, keeping in line with the overall editorial vision of the hunt.

As a small side note, it's fairly easy to unwind the game and look through our Renpy code. This partially motivated us to keep the answer out of the game and to obfuscate the intermediate a-has. The best you can do with the code is figure out which answers work for which questions, but that's easy enough without looking through the code.

We were somewhat wed to the counterintuitive ordering of the answers for extracting the intermediate clue and answer phrases because we didn't want the first date to only have the first letters of the word ANSWER extracted. The grid at the end of each date was added after a few playtests to motivate solvers into ordering with the correct method. In playtesting, we also noticed that many solvers skipped past the intermediate phrases or didn't realize that the "GO THINK" part of the clue phrase meant to refer to the thinking texts in the story. We were ultimately okay with that, reasoning that a strong team with the intuition and knowledge to make the connection between the shapes and answers would still be able to solve the puzzle just fine. Perhaps we should've made that step more necessary, but our playtesters seemed to enjoy the puzzle irrespective of whether they fully used the intermediate phrase.

Despite simplicity being an explicit design goal, we still wish we could've done something more with the medium. We hope that some of the peripheral features of this puzzle (humor, art, interactivity) were able to make up for that. Ultimately, we feel like it was best that this puzzle primarily focus on a simple concept (the flattening of the shapes), but perhaps in the future we'll revisit this medium for something a bit more intricate...