Virtual Reality Coaster
by Evan Davis, Todd Etter, Yar Woo
Answer: HYPER JUMP
The puzzle presents 10 first-person point-of-view videos of theme park rides (one of them claims to be broken). The first nine rides each encode a different single word answer.
Ride #1
The tunnels of the water slide encode the word PROJECT in morse code (with tunnels of length 1 or 3 for dot and dash, and turns as letter breaks).
Ride #2
The wooden roller coaster consists almost entirely of hills. The first hill goes up only one unit of height and has a sign on the top of it that begins with the letter “A.” The second hill goes up 26 units of height and has a sign on the top that begins with the letter “Z.” As a visual aid, the ride changes track color every five units of height. The remaining hills’ heights, translated as alphanumeric, spell ANSWERS.
Ride #3
This mechanical robot arm ride yanks the passengers in two different cardinal directions from the center facing orientation on each stretch of straightaway. These two directions can be interpreted as semaphore letters and spell LOGICALLY.
Ride #4
This smaller steel roller coaster consists entirely of stretches that contain exactly 5 hills and/or corkscrews. The hills and corkscrews look a bit like 1’s and 0’s and can be decoded as binary bits to spell WITH.
Ride #5
This tall steel roller coaster has four colored segments. Each of them spell a lower-case cursive letter as viewed from the side. The four letters spell BLUE.
Ride #6.
This bobsled-style wooden ride also has colored segments that in some cases overlap themselves. When viewed from overhead, they spell lowercase printed letters: PURPLE.
Ride #7
This go-kart track has a sign at the front that reads KARTS! NEW CARS!. Along the track are 12 signs that each include a number (10,6,5,8,7,3,4,11,2,9,1,12). Reordering KARTSNEWCARS using those numbers results in the phrase ANSWER TRACKS.
Ride #8
This “jungle cruise” style raft ride passes 9 sets of six objects. In each case, the group of six objects is a braille encoding, based on the location of the objects or the location of the noticeably different objects within the set. The braille letter spell PROVIDING.
Ride #9
This steel roller coaster requires sound. Twice on the ride, it shows a sign (first AMP IT UP, then ALL METAL), followed first by 7, and then by 8 synchronized ride events and enthusiastic rider noises. The rider noises can be associated and mapped to the letters in AMP IT UP or ALL METAL. The ride then enters a dark room, where the sounds continue. Those sounds, using the same mapping, spell TEMPLATE.
Ride #10
This Ultimate Coaster does not work. Instead, it provides an error code: 491524331. The answers to the first nine rides put together form the phrase PROJECT ANSWERS LOGICALLY WITH BLUE PURPLE TRACKS PROVIDING TEMPLATE. All of these rides are in the same park (designed in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3), and there is a 10th ride (with blue and purple tracks) that has no video. That ride can be reconstructed using the previous nine videos, and the ride is structured so that each segment indicates spaces into which to place answer words, including ascenders and descenders as guides. Doing so provides a new ordering for your answer words (WITH LOGICALLY PURPLE ANSWERS TRACKS PROJECT BLUE TEMPLATE PROVIDING). Applying the error code as indices into this new ordering provides the answer word HYPERJUMP.