This puzzle starts out with a bit of croquet. There's a tradition in
these sorts of puzzle games to have at least one piece of physical
challenge, and this was it. There's also a tradition of having an
audio puzzle and this is also it.
The first thing that jumps out about the audio puzzle (aside from the
Rickroll) is that all the songs have "heart" or "hearts" in the
lyrics. "Heart" is way too obvious an answer, so we keep looking.
We can probably rule out anything involving song titles or artists -
that would be a bit too obscure. So we're left with little else
besides the lyrics. There are eight songs, which is as long as the
space in the answer boxes, suggesting we've got one letter hiding in
each song.
First letters? Nope. Last letters? Nope. How about that first hint:
"WTF?? OIC!" OIC = "Oh I See" means.. words that are also letters!
After another listen or three (or if you've already written all the
lyrics down), you should be able to spot the eight letters:
ARYUTIBO
(And yes, "I" and "A" are obviously words that sound like letters.)
At this point, you might find it helpful to write all the letters on
small squares of paper and shuffle them around. After another ten
minutes of banging your head against a tree, you should be able to
unscramble these to form:
OBITUARY
And that again fits with the morbid theme of the answers. Things
aren't looking good for Alice.
(This puzzle was inspired by a similar one in BANG 12. Unlike that
one, we strictly stuck to our "heart" theme, which made finding
workable songs very challenging.)
