Kyoryuful Boyfriend - Walkthrough
Designed and written by Ivan Wang, Rachel Wei, and Alex PeiArtwork by Rachel WeiImplemented by Ivan Wang
Inspired by:
Hatoful Boyfriend
Love Letter
Dinosaur toys
Kyoryuful Boyfriend is a wordplay-based dating sim set in prehistoric times, where you and your team attempt to date your way through a castle full of dinosaurs on your mission to deliver a letter of love to the princess. The characters are taken from the game of Love Letter in ascending order of rank.
To get through each level, you need to get to know each dinosaur and learn how to successfully charm them. Each dinosaur has a "mechanic" that determines which responses it will or won’t accept as answers. With the exception of the finale, each dinosaur will ask one final question with a free-form text box.
In most of the acts, the accepted word or phrase (and any related words) will be italicized to indicate its importance. Most of the dinosaur’s names and personalities are relevant to their mechanic, and an additional clue can be found in the losing branch of the storyline (after submitting an incorrect guess).
Acts I - V
| Act | Dinosaur | Mechanic | Their words | Accepted answer(s) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Act I | Gerard the Guard | Gerard the Guard, the gallant protector who guards the castle from end to end, likes words that start with "g" and end with "d". | GUARD, THE GUILD, GOLD, THE GRAVEYARD | Sin: GREED | |
| Act II | Bridget the Priest | Bridge[t] the Pries[t], a quiet and shy dinosaur who keeps trailing off at the end of her sentences, likes words that remain valid words if you leave out the last letter. | SUPER[B], THOUGH[T], LATE[X], THE PRINCES[S], MORAL[E] | Royal clothing: CROW[N], CIRCLE[T], ROB[E], DOUBLE[T] (We did not accept plural forms since we felt that circumvented the puzzle.) | |
| Act III | Joffrey the Baron | Joffrey the Baron, a classic tsundere, runs hot and cold; he tends towards extremes. When he prompts you with a word in italics, he expects you to respond with a word that contains an opposite as a substring. | TODAY & KNIGHT, LESSON & ARMORER, WINSLOW & BREAKFAST, NOSE & EYES | Age: GODDESS & SEVEN/ELEVEN/SEVENTEEN (We designated a cutoff at seventeen, as anything older than that no longer qualifies as young enough to be a child.) | |
| Act IV | Kawaii Handmaid (oωo✿) | The Kawaii Handmaid (oωo✿) likes words that are as kawaii and expressive as she is - she responds to words with the cute emoticons "awa" and "owo" in them. (We wished to include words with "uwu", but this was uwunfortunately impossible.) | A COWORKER, I’M UNAWARE, SHOW OFF YOUR SMILE, BREAK AWAY | US states: DELAWARE, HAWAII | |
| Act V | This act is split into two branches. At the end of each branch, the Countess asks you an additional question in order to bring the two arguing characters back together. | ||||
| Act V.i | Prince Woodsworth the Fourth | Prince Woodsworth the Fourth (or Prince WTF, if you will) is an erudite and knowledgable individual, but as a Millennial dinosaur he’s also quite fond of texting acronyms. Prince Woodsworth the Fourth will approve if you use phrases that could make up common slang acronyms. | BY RULING BRAVELY (brb), WILLING TO FAIL (wtf), FOR MY LOVE (fml), THAT LOVE DOESN’T REST (tl;dr) | Famous astronomer: GALILEO GALILEI (gg), JOHANNES KEPLER (jk) | |
| Act V.ii | King Elfred | King Elfred is loud and shouts in ALL CAPS; as a result of his argument, he is red in the face. He will accept answers such that if the (non-contiguous) substring RED is removed, a valid word remains (this remainder is clued by a word in the rest of his sentence). | BOREDOM (explode), Seeing people HARMED (pig), They are KINDRED souls (charitable), LEARNED (thin) | Emotion: HATRED (an aura that wears heavy on my head) | |
| Act V.iii | The Countess | The Countess asks for a word or phrase that can bring the two arguing royals back together. To solve this mini-meta, we must take the words in red said by each character at the end of their branch and apply the transformation of the other character. | FRAMED -> FAM IN LATER YEARS -> ILY | Joining together these transformations yields the word FAMILY, a thoughtful reminder of what matters most. However, we also accepted ILY FAM, a more modernized message which gets the same idea across. | |
Act VI: 👸🦖
The Princess does not speak in words, but emojis. This metapuzzle involves a series of multiple choice questions. Each answer involves one of the previous characters’ mechanics in order of appearance. Solving all 6 correctly will unlock the key to her heart.| Question (Emojis) | Translation | Dinosaur | Answer | Translation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
🦕👈👤🛠️🕘➡️🕔❓ | What is your occupation? | Gerard the Guard | 💂 | GUARD |
👑🏞️⬅️🐾➕❓ | What animal would you add to the royal zoo? | Bridget the Priest | 🐇 | RABBI[T] |
☀️📅🧺🦕🦕😋🍴❓ | What food would you bring to a picnic on a sunny day? | Joffrey the Baron | 🥮 | MOONCAKE |
🎊🧑🤝🧑👏🦕👏🦕👏🦕🥳💯❓ | What kind of ceremony would you like to attend? | Kawaii Handmaid (oωo✿) | 🏆🏅 | AWARDS |
🍯🌙✈️🌍⌛🏛️🗺️📍❓ | What historic landmark would you visit for a honeymoon? | Prince Woodsworth the Fourth | 🗽 | STATUE OF LIBERTY (sol) |
🖍️🏳️🏙️💰🏦💱(🇬🇧)❓ | What kind of flag would you buy with royal bank funds? (UK variant) | King Elfred | 🏁 | CHEQUERED (bank funds) |
Author's Notes
This puzzle was inspired by Puzzle Potluck 3’s A Not So Leisurely Sport, a typing game that involved multiple rounds of finding common traits among random words. We really enjoyed the frantic collaboration involved in staring at a set of words. To make it more teamwork-based, we implemented a voting system to let players vote on their favorite answer; we hoped this would encourage more interactivity.
We wanted to include a more story-based game to balance out the earlier fast-paced action games in the Playmate. While there have been a large number of text-based adventures, we wanted to introduce the lesser-known dating simulation style of games to a puzzlehunt. The ridiculousness of Hatoful Boyfriend meshed wonderfully with the story and characters from Love Letter and the aesthetic of dinosaur toys. We hope you had as much fun going through the wacky adventure as we did writing it!
We’d like to apologize to all the teams that submitted some variant of LETANENEMYSLIPIN; this throwaway line in the dialogue about being a grievous sin was a huge red herring and completely unintentional. We’re sorry none of our testsolvers caught it, and hope that it didn’t stop you from enjoying the experience!
AMA: Who is best dinosaur?
- IW: Kawaii Handmaid (oωo✿)
- AP: Kawaii Handmaid (oωo✿)
- RW: Prince Woodsworth the Fourth
(This should by no means sway your vote in the final survey, the results of which will be released in Wrap-up.)
Credits
- Thanks to https://kawaiiface.net/ for supplying all of the cute emoticons. (✿◠‿◠)