Solution: Where's Waldo Now

Answer: ALONE IN PAIRIS

Written by Jonathan

This is a throwback to Puzzle Rojak 1's pure metas. As referenced in the flavortext, we clearly want to use Puzzle Rojak 1’s answers, and we can either list them out individually or find them from the answer page in the Runaround which lists them all. Having COMMANDS, NATIONAL or NICE MEN should be the easier break in points, but either way, the answers in round 1 seem suspiciously like those of the answers in Puzzle Rojak 1. We can identify each answer as a substring of one of the puzzles in Puzzle Rojak 1 with an additional letter, with answers chosen such that the substrings were unique. Figure out in what position of the original answer the additional letter is placed, and extract the extra letters to spell out the meta answer Waldo is ALONE IN PAIRIS.

Author's Notes

I came up with this meta while Puzzle Rojak 1 was being run. My original answer for this meta idea was AT HOME, which was later changed to fit the round 2 theming of Puzzle Rojak 2, and it was incredibly lucky that we could get this answer to work given our answer constraints from Puzzle Rojak 1. The idea of a first round pure meta that offered a throwback to our last hunt appealed to me. This meta is extremely backsolvable, but backsolving is pretty fun :). This puzzle came together really nicely: all the metas in Puzzle Rojak 1 and this one are pure metas, the contrast between adding a single letter in this meta versus the pairs used in the metas in Puzzle Rojak 1 is contrasted with ALONE/PAIR in the answer, and we nicely led into the Paris Olympics Round 2 theme for this hunt contrasting the Tokyo Olympics which was held in 2021 (when Puzzle Rojak 1 was held in December, thus having Waldo "miss" the Olympics).