Heroine’s Journey
Answer:
LOVING FAMILY
You can start by solving the maze (see yellow cells above). You'll find that the path will pass through many (but not all) of the wisps (green cells). Upon closer inspection, you'll find that each of the wisps covers a letter from one of the words in the bank (purple cells). For example, the wisp near the entrance covers the F in KING FERGUS.
Taking these wisps in order of the path yields FOLLOW YOUR HEART:
| Clue |
Letter |
|
| KING FERGUS |
F |
| WILL O THE WISPS |
O |
| QUEEN ELINOR |
L |
| WEE DINGWALL |
L |
| THE CROW |
O |
| THE WITCH |
W |
| YOUNG MACINTOSH |
Y |
| DUNBROCH |
O |
| ANGUS |
U |
| ARCHERY |
R |
| HARRIS |
H |
| HUBERT |
E |
| HAMISH |
A |
| MORDU |
R |
| TRUST |
T |
| CAKE |
(not on path) |
| STATUS QUO |
(not on path) |
| MARRIAGE |
(not on path) |
| IGNORANCE |
(not on path) |
| SELFISHNESS |
(not on path) |
As an aside, you may also notice that some wisps and word bank words were not on the path (orange cells). These wisps hold words that do not lead Merida to her fate, and should be ignored.
To "follow your heart," you then need to return to the word search and look for "heart"s. The trick here is that each heart is actually also heart-shaped (red cells below), and envelops specific letters (blue cells).
Taking the letter at the heart of each "heart" from top to bottom, you'll get LOVING FAMILY as your answer.
Authors' Notes
This was a fun, but tedious puzzle to make. We knew early on that we wanted to have a word search puzzle, in line with Harvard cs50x's Sword Search and other similar puzzles. In our variant, we hid hearts in the shape of hearts, a fitting final step following an intermediate answer of "follow your heart."
To add our own twist, we added a forest maze with wisps, referencing how Merida ran into the forest and was guided by Will O' the Wisps in the film.
Early versions of the puzzle were also much more difficult. At first, we didn't provide a word bank, scrambled the letters in "heart", and had set our final answer to TEAGHLACH (the Scottish Gaelic word for "family", pronounced like "chEYE-luck"). We ultimately simplified all of these aspects to make it easier for those unfamiliar with Brave characters (and Gaelic!) to solve.
"Bloopers": We discovered during playtesting that the letters from the wisps that are not along the path also spell out the word ENNUI, which is "a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement; boredom". This was actually completely unintentional, but amazingly fitting, as it largely describes why Merida hated the idea of marriage.