SOLUTION: DOUBLE VISION

ANSWER: DUST STORM

The five photos in this puzzle are taken from the game Life is Strange; these are optional photos that can be taken to earn achievements. Solvers should notice after identifying the associated achievement for each photo that the achievement names are almost long enough to fit in the photo "blanks", but they are one letter too short. This is where the butterflies come in: as a reference to the game mechanic of rewinding time to "redo" game events, photographs with butterflies on them signal that the corresponding letter needs to be repeated. The achievement names are:

Photo Achievement Name
Broken window Z[OO]MED IN
Diner sign PROCE[SS]OR
Skeleton HISTOGRA[MM]AR
Barn owl MANUA[LL]Y EXPOSED
Broken bottles SILHOUE[TT]ES

Each photo can only be taken in one chapter of the game, and they are sorted chronologically as a solving aid. Extraction is straightforward: the letters corresponding to the given numbers can be ordered accordingly in the line of photos at the bottom of the puzzle, spelling "DUSTORM". This is nonsensical, but as a final use of the puzzle mechanic, the pair of ST photos has a butterfly on it, indicating that the ST bigram should be repeated, giving the answer DUST STORM.


About This Puzzle

The original version of this puzzle did not play well with my partner; instead of the highlighted photos being numbered, the achievements were given in extraction order, and those blanks were highlighted red. As a result, my partner took the butterfly letters as the letters to extract instead. Even after guiding them to those red letters as the extraction, this puzzle had been presented as a Google Sheet with the "paired photos" instead represented by a pair of adjacent cells with a bold border around them like this:

This led my partner to, rather than duplicate the ST string as its own unit, double both of the letters to spell DUSSTTORM. This was the low point of their hunt solve experience, and I knew I had to figure out a more clear way to present that puzzle here. Judging from the fact that I received no hint requests for this puzzle during this hunt, I'd like to think I did a good job fixing those flaws, and this became one of my favorite puzzles in the hunt, both mechanically and visually.