Pin the Tail

Written by Andrew He, Katie Dunn, Catherine Wu, and Patrick Xia

Answer: FOLLOWED

In Act II, some puzzles are entangled with one in the opposite dimension. The two puzzles each have their own theme, core mechanic, answer, and solution, but each requires some information or action from the other in order to solve. This puzzle is entangled with Meta-Eval Times.

In this game, we are running around in the dark with only our location, given as coordinates and as a red dot (which is sus). We can use audio cues of taking a step or running into a wall to map out the area. We find that the shape of the map is the Skeld map from Among Us.

Occasionally, ominous music plays at different volumes; sometimes, this increase in volume is followed by the sound of a knife. If, after walking around for a bit, we check a new phrase in Meta-Eval Times, we notice that some teammates are missing. From the stab sounds and the missing teammates, we realize that we are actually the impostor, killing our teammates. At the beginning, the teammates wander around randomly, and the ominous music tells us whether we are close to a teammate. This is clued as the ominous music is rarely in the same place, and because we are told in Meta-Eval Times that the teammates are "milling around." As we hunt down the remaining teammates, our dot grows larger; upon completion, our dot turns green to indicate that we have killed all 8 of the teammates and the "game" is over.

After each kill, we can check which teammate just died by looking for the missing teammate in Meta-Eval Times. Resetting the game will also undo all the teammate disappearances. The teammate has two levels of constraints -- in this puzzle, we use the second level. Each teammate is looking for a specific character, word, number, or letter, which we can use to extract the clue phrase ROOM NAME. The Among Us map has canonical room names, which we will use.

Teammate Constraint Specific constraint Letter
1 Scrabble score less than 30 Scrabble score of 18 R
2 Majority dashes in Morse Has 15 more _ than . O
6 Starts with a letter in ROYGBIV Starts with O O
9 End directly east 13 letters of NSWE M
10 Contains Super Smash Bros Ultimate fighter with extra letter Contains NESS+1 N (first letter)
13 Contains a digit Contains ONE A
15 Contains anagram of a Greek letter Anagram of MU M
16 Missing a vowel (not including Y) Missing E E

While a teammate is still alive, we can submit phrases in Meta-Eval Times to satisfy their first constraint. If we submit a phrase that satisfies over half the teammates, we are told that they are going to "type up their metas." We infer that the teammates with their constraint satisfied go back to their room in the game to type up their puzzle. (Unsatisfied teammates will move randomly.) When we approach teammates in this state, we hear typing noises instead of ominous music. Furthermore, we can tell by the fact the typing sounds are always in the same place that the typing teammates don't move. Because of this, it is easy to kill all of the teammates by satisfying their constraint and half the others if we wanted. This figure show where the teammates will type (and die).

We observe that the number of stab sounds (or squishes, when walking on the spot where the murder occured) ranges from 1-3 depending on the teammate. Using these as indices into their final rooms and ordering by teammate number, we obtain the answer FOLLOWED.

Teammate Room Number of sounds Letter
1 Cafeteria 3 F
2 O2 1 O
6 Electrical 2 L
9 Lower Engine 1 L
10 Storage 3 O
13 Weapons 1 W
15 Medbay 2 E
16 Admin 2 D