I absolutely loved this. I printed out a copy for my mom (who is also a fan of puzzles) before I was even finished. She laughed out loud when she got to 6. The dwarf planets clued me into to most of the tricks (I like astronomy), and 9 is the first puzzle I totally completed, but I didn't actually figure out what the bottom clues were until I only had puzzles 1, 2, 11, and one word of 3 left. Puzzle one definitely gave me the most trouble, but it took me longer to realize that puzzle 2 was also zodiac, (which was hilarious). Everything came together so beautifully at the end. A wonderfully crafted puzzle.

Good game! I realized there was a metapuzzle almost immediately (also that's part of how I found it in the first place), got inklings of what it was near the end, made a second copy of the file, figured out Puzzle 11's gimmick pretty quickly because I happen to know the names of plutoids off the top of my head, and had a lot of fun. It took me most of an evening.

If I have any criticism it's that Puzzle 1 is (still) too hard, but, maybe that's the intended difficulty? There's definitely other stuff in here where you'd need to know trivia to connect it to the theme, like with HAUMEA and QUARTZ, and the theme for Puzzle 1 can't be too obvious. I ended up solving 12 first by guessing and then going back and doing 1.

Brilliant game. So clearly a work of love. <3

Beat it together with my gf, so good! I thought it was quite funny that the only thing we had to research was puzzle 1, it somehow is the hardest which suits its position in the overall puzzle. Thanks for making!

This was amazingly well put together. Excellent work! I look forward to playing whatever you create next :)

Great puzzle book so far but i cant figure out the category to 1.. i assumed it was "Cookies", But thats no where near 8 letters.. Unless i'm dumb and thats the category covered up by the blue splotch next to the half covered z6

Edit: Yep- thats it- the clues at the bottom of the page are in order of the puzzle categories. the c8 i thought was gonna be similar to "cookies" is actually "Category" because thats the 11th thing on the bottom, and this is the 11th puzzle-

late to the game but just saw a video recommended on YouTube and decided to play before watching.

what an awesome game! I’ve sent it to several friends and recommended it to cracking the cryptic also.

loved the multiple journeys through the puzzles.

and having the same word twice in puzzle 11 was hilarious! I thought I’d gone wrong so many times.

loved it

That rocked! Spent an extra about 20 minutes trying to figure out why there was an extra a, and kept thinking the end wasnt "message" because of it, before finally realizing it was "a message."

I loved the foe carton, made me certain I was on the right track! :) I did all of them up to 0 according to their most basic form first. Then it gave me LOK vibes, and I saw it was an inspiration after I did 0, so I tried to solve a bunch of things by jumping gaps and doing wrap arounds, like SIRE, and the Rules, before finishing a couple of the other puzzles and being confused why it hadnt been used (I solved 9, 4, then 7, while thinkin that the rule was "only self crossing is allowed" and that you were able to wrap and jump gaps like LOK). Then I went to back to three, got stumped for a really long time, had some wacky stuff going on, and finally tried enter crossing question. That was when I had an epiphany, went and fixed Rules, and then solved the rest.

Im excited to play more of your puzzles, this was an amazing experience! :))))

Same as merpederp (fellow Lingo enjoyer?), I found this game via Olexa and went to play it before watching the video. Was not disappointed.

Definitely has LOK vibes, perfectly captures the sense of discovery and having to go back to previous puzzles.

I somehow managed to stumble my way through the word searches and get all the words found, except for the second to final search (with palindrome and timepiece). Though, knowing how the formats and everything worked, and using the list of words found for the 12th search to reverse engineer the missing piece, I was able to solve the final word search. (I still haven't gotten that 11th puzzle completed though)

Just finished it (almost, still some work to do one puzzle 1), 3:20am where I live, I absolutely loved this game. Usually word searches are boring because they're too easy, this was not the case here :) Overall excellent game, I'll recommend it to my wordgames-enjoying friends

I just finished this and really enjoyed it! Excellently done! I had seen it recommended by Board Game Blitz on Youtube. I did version 1.23 on paper.

I found puzzle #1 to be the hardest part. After I tried to do all the crosswords, and went back and changed my answers on them after realizing the words could bend etc, I used puzzle #12 to help me figure out what the leftovers were on the puzzles I hadn't finished yet. Then after getting the final message, I didn't trust that I was actually done lol because I had no idea what the letters and numbers at the bottoms of the pages were and assumed they were an additional puzzle to do after the word searches. I came here to find out how to use those clues, and I used them along with like four lists of cookie types to finally finish word search #1 haha! 

Anyway that was really fun and I didn't want to put it down to go to bed last night! Great work!

very fun! printed it off and did it with a pencil

somehow managed to do the entire thing without realizing that specifically the right-hand side of the dividing line had mirrored words, just figured that “some” of the words were mirrored. and totally fell for the TH–E misdirection in the numbers puzzle. worked out in the end since most words don’t make sense mirrored and I figured you wouldn’t have me looking for made-up words 😌

Really enjoyed your puzzle. It started out so cryptic! But once I realized what was going on with the second puzzle it all fell into place. Also this was my first time going through a puzzle in PDF form but it all worked out very smoothly so I gotta check more out.

This was really wonderful, super elegant design and I loved how the later puzzles recontextualised the earlier ones :D

Seems like our journey was quite different to several people here! Maybe because the puzzle's been tweaked (we were playing version 1.25) or maybe because we're used to Mystery Hunt style puzzles. We spotted the cryptic numbers at the bottom of each puzzle and considered a few interpretations, though we progressed through puzzles 1-3 in the normal way (MOBSTER, RESET etc). We were carefully noting down each letter that was obscured in case those spelled something. It was around puzzle 4 or 5 that we realised what the letters at the bottom mean (it helps that we're veterans of Edrith's Quizzes that use the same notation, and puzzles 4-5 are two of the easiest sequences to spot) - though even there there was some reconsideration of inferred rules because 4 can be solved in "ortho-Boggle" style with no diagonals, but 5 can't. At that point we went back and solved 2-5 in the true way, though we still had no idea what to do with 1 or 6. Around this point we had the idea to start highlighting leftover letters and found the connection to the bottom-right clue as well. From that point 7, 9 and 10 were straightforward (though 10 played some fun tricks with the blobs); we'd realised some of the words are listed reversed, but 9 was I think the clearest confirmation that it's specifically the right-hand words that are mirrored. We'd been expecting a metapuzzle so solved 11 fairly easily, and found 0 didn't really tell us anything new - only confirmed the rules we'd already inferred. Then on about the third or fourth look back at puzzle 1 we finally worked out what 1 was doing (I've only heard of one of the five given kinds of cookie, but thankfully my wife reads American recipes) and knocked that one out. 12 was a very satisfying conclusion, drawing everything together, and so delightful how the final extraction could only by solved by combining three strands of "leftovers of 12", "traceable string in 12" and "English letter patterns". Amusingly, the one thing we missed until the final page was the count of answers - we hadn't noticed that there were exactly twelve words to find in each puzzle, even though we'd found them all!

Thanks so much for making the puzzle, and now we're very much looking forward to trying the sequel :)

I just finished v1.25! Thank you! From my texts with a friend, it took me exactly 30 minutes to figure out I needed “AS” in the final message. Oops! Afterwards I did go watch Icely Puzzles video on your book and I do like the updated 12th :) I like the omega theme too. 

Personally I needed 0Rules. I “solved” 1-11 in order without looking at ANY of the meta puzzles. I did mark some palindromes but didn’t make the connection with any metapuzzles. I really had to study the bottom left a-z0-9 on the 0th puzzle to understand how it works for everything else. 

Here’s a photo of my completed 12! https://imgur.com/a/NF38UOd

What a delightful puzzle! Also got here from the Failbetter Games newsletter. Thank you for putting this out into the world!

I love all the little details - I think the foe carton illustration is my favorite 😊

Terrific stuff, big Kevin Wald (ucaoimhu) vibes. Solved in 3-ish hours.

Hey - I've been having a lot of fun with version 1.25 and have a question to confirm if I'm interpreting puzzle 0 correctly...
[Rot13] Vf Chmmyr 0, gur Ehyrf chmmyr, fhccbfrq gb grnpu gung yrggref pna'g or erhfrq (Yvxr gur B gung vagrefrpgf aBg naq nyyBjrq), be gung jbeqf fubhyqa'g or va n fgenvtug iregvpny/ubevmbagny yvar?

I have been trying to solve Puzzle 2, but I haven't been able to find a way to find/solve... [Rot13] "Ebbfgre" naq "Qentba" jvgubhg er-hfvat gur E.  Nevermind, I found a different way to map Ebbfgre and should be set.

Thank you so much for the puzzle/game! I've been having a nice time working on it with my wife.

amazing, amazing, amazing puzzle. i have a knack for solving this kind of tricky lateral thinking puzzle far quicker than intended so the real test of a puzzle is whether it holds up even when that is the case. i cracked what was going on by puzzle five — i had solved the "normal" way through the first three, at puzzle four i saw all the month names and chunked the letter space up by month but was still confused at the may/yam interaction. this still gave me the click i needed for all the numbers in the bottom of each page (including the bottom right), so i went back to three and... couldn't figure it since i was looking at my previous naive solution and assuming those words were correct. i went onto five and the numbers really made it obvious that in some cases, there are weird diagonal connections. after solving it i went back to three and saw question mark and from there everything just broke open, i looked back at one and groaned seeing the rules and realizing what they meant. at this point the backwards words on the right side clicked and my last bit of confusion with the numbers at the bottom of the page resolved.

so, having discovered the logic of the whole book far earlier than intended, was the book a very rote solve? absolutely not, oh my god.  i loved figuring the theme for 1 and 2,  i particularly love the misdirect for 2 and the slow realization that it's zodiac animals and not just the random matching words we'd figured out, i loved that we had to re-populate the inkblots in 3 and that we used that sneaky little one i was wondering about at the bottom of the crossword, i was tickled that three became eight in 5, i LOVED the trick with the corners in 1, i had a great time using 11 to actually figure out the theme for one, which had still stumped me, as well as figuring out leftovers for 12 before even seeing 0! oh yes, and who can forget zodiac/zodiac??? i laughed out loud upon picking up on that one. realizing that parts of our metapuzzle were backwards was delightful, and i was grinning from cheek to cheek upon realizing that the final phrase is both in the gaps and as a contiguous region that we have to circle. this is EXACTLY the way a good metapuzzle should collapse in on itself at the end of a sequence.

good god. this was an incredible thing to play. you really nail the way that a puzzle is supposed to smoothly and cleverly twist and turn both on the macro level and the micro level. i'm so thrilled with every second that i spent on this!

(admittedly, 7-10 were straightforward given much of the above, but it was fun observing the way that the book tutorialized for people who hadn't yet figured the mechanics out)

Thank you for making this super unique game!

I saw a post about it on the metroidbrania subreddit and decided to check it out. Initially I thought I would abondon it since it was not clicking for me, but omw the moment it did I could not stop until I completely finished it. Absolutely amazing work and I loved it so much. Especially the last bit of search nr 12, which felt so cool. 

Only after finishing did I read some reviews and saw people discuss how they had figured out the letters and numbers at the bottom which alluded me the entire time. I went back and figured out the page numbers which made me figure out the other numbers, it seems so silly in hindsight, but oh well.

Ima check out if you have made some other things because this is exactly how I like my metroidbranias

Just played through 12 Word Searches, it was really clever and satisfying! Thanks for making such a neat thing. I also love LOK and Patrick Traynor so I will definitely check out 800PixelGorilla too. I love the way it set expectations and then reframed them as the puzzle went on.