Location: Graveyard
Depth: 302

Solution to Say Cheese and Dive!

by Shawn Westerdale, Pweaver, and Adam Rosenfield

Answer: CURL UP

This puzzle is a text adventure game where the solver is exploring a series of sub-dungeons in the form of holes in a giant Swiss Cheese Dungeon.

At the start of the game, you can choose a hole to explore. At the entrance to the dungeons, you encounter a sign warning you of the perils that await you. This conveniently acronyms to "IGNORE ROOM NAMES"; they're there to give each room a unique identifier and aren't actually otherwise relevant.

As you adventure around, there are a few things you might notice: there are strange objects (weapons) laying around, there are terrifying muensters that you occasionally encounter, some rooms have various amounts of mold, and other rooms smell like bravery.

Rooms that smell like bravery are adjacent to a room containing a weapon. Rooms that contain mold are one or two rooms away from a muenster. The point of these two vaguely Hunt the Wumpus-y features is that they allow you to find things in the hole without having to stumble upon them by pure luck. They also mean that you can be careful and avoid accidentally running into a muenster and dying before you get the weapon you need to kill it.

The solver can begin their adventures by exploring these holes. Each weapon has a power level associated with it ranging from 1 to N (where N is the num- ber of weapons in that hole), and each weapon pairs to exactly one muenster (generally guessable by some sort of terrible pun or wordplay, or other silliness). When you encounter a muenster, you can try to fight it by using a weapon against it. If you use the correct weapon, the muenster dies; if you use the incorrect weapon, the munster eats you. You can also try to run away, in which case you have a 50% chance of escaping into an adjacent room, and otherwise you get eaten. Getting eaten is annoying but doesn't suck that much, since you can just start the hole again, and it doesn't really change.

As you adventure around the holes, you'll eventually find all the weapons and kill all the muensters. Once you defeat all the muensters in the hole, you nd a piece of paper. Do this in each hole and sort the pieces of paper by the hole number and you get the message "CONNECT THE LOCATIONS OF THE MUENSTERS". Might not be so clear what that means yet, so we'll get back to that later.

Now, in your adventures, there is another strange thing you may have no- ticed. If you try to draw a map of these holes, you'll find that you can't do so on a single at sheet of paper. It turns out all of the rooms in the holes are arranged on the surface of a 3D letter. Reconstruct each of the holes and you find that the letters range from A to F.

Now back to the cluephrase we got from the pieces of paper earlier. If you make a 3D map of each of the holes, you can then connect each of the muensters with a string, ordered by the power level of the weapon you used to kill them. Doing so, you'll nd that the string draws out another letter.

Sort the holes by the letter formed by the hole topology and extract the letter you obtain from connecting the muensters and you get the answer CURL UP.

Below are pictures of what the 3D maps of all of the holes look like.