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MITMH2022
Public Access

Solution to A Wrinkle in Time

The Ministry

Answer: GET BOGGED DOWN WITH
by Jen McTeague

This puzzle is written as the GM’s explanation for how solvers are supposed to solve an escape room, but some letters are starred out. Reading out the starred letters, the message is ESCAPE THIS PODCAST EPISODES ONE TO TWENTY SIX.

This should point solvers to Escape This Podcast - a wonderful podcast where one of the hosts makes a new escape room every episode and brings guests in every two weeks to solve them. Fortunately, each of the rooms also comes with a pdf or word document that explains how to run the room for other people, and each one has a section that looks suspiciously like the puzzle text.

Each paragraph of the puzzle text documents a puzzle from one episode from the first twenty six episodes of Escape This Podcast. Solvers need to find the episode each one is from and then convert from A-Z. This will give the phrase JMCTEAGUE’S LATEST EPISODE.

At time of hunt, Jen McTeague’s latest episode on Escape this Podcast is Dimensional Analysis. One of the handouts from this room is the mentioned “map of the tesseract”. For each puzzle, input in the two rooms in any order on the tesseract map to get another letter. These letters in puzzle order spell ANSWER GET BOGGED DOWN WITH.

Data for Wrinkle in Time
ParagraphPuzzleEpisodeLetterRoomsLetter
Paragraph 2RocketS1 E10JI, DA
Paragraph 3Obstacle CourseS1 E13MI, GN
Paragraph 4Laser ChairS1 E3CG, CS
Paragraph 5Colored BlocksS2 E5TB, NW
Paragraph 6ChimneyS1 E5EM, NE
Paragraph 7ShowerS1 E1AK, JR
Paragraph 8DEMILACS1 E7GL, JG
Paragraph 9HoofprintsS2 E6UC, FE
Paragraph 10Mirror OutsideS1 E5EI, OT
Paragraph 11Cooler CodeS1 E4SP, AB
Paragraph 12Flag -> PhoneS1 E12LH, MO
Paragraph 13Under XS1 E1AD, JG
Paragraph 14Lock as KeyS2 E5TE, NG
Paragraph 15Heat Atop BedS1 E5EH, BE
Paragraph 16Feed the BirdsS2 E4SF, AD
Paragraph 17TreesearchS2 E5TF, LD
Paragraph 18Brush HairS1 E5EM, BO
Paragraph 19Lounge ChairS2 E1PD, OW
Paragraph 20Move StatueS1 E9IP, ON
Paragraph 21Black MambaS2 E4SK, AW
Paragraph 22IJ MorseS1 E15OL, HI
Paragraph 23Tim TamsS1 E4DK, GT
Paragraph 24Take Apart ChairS1 E5EP, CH

Author's Notes

As soon as Palindrome won the hunt, I knew I had to hide something in Escape this Podcast - and people who knew me would expect nothing less. From there it was a race to get this puzzle done along with Dimensional Analysis done in time for the July taping, while also trying not to make it obvious that they were related. Hopefully that succeeded - but I'll be interested to see how many teams were suspicious of my episode when it came out in August.

The original concept for this puzzle was to be a text adventure escape room with the puzzles that were described in the final version, but it got cut because the puzzle was 4 hours long, which is not really good for an Act 2 puzzle. If you would like to mess around with that version of the puzzle, it is still up here. There may still be some bugs, but hopefully will be an interesting look at what a harder version of this puzzle would've looked like.