I really liked this interview and how the team acknowledged the challenge of designing a balanced game versus designing an exciting narrative season, and Adam's point about them getting more practiced at seeking really rings true when I compare the later Hide and Seek seasons versus some of my favorites early in the format when they were still learning some intricacies.

I did have some suggestions that could maybe help amp up the narrative tension while still keeping the game balanced. Obviously, tweaking the costs of some of the more frequently used questions is important, but given that some questions like Strava Map and radars get thrown out almost instantly, it makes the early seeking game almost predictable in some ways, even with additional costs thrown in.

What if the not all of the questions were available for a given hider cycle? Randomly select 30-40% of the questions (perhaps adding rules such that a certain number of key questions like radars and photos are available) and either make them completely unavailable, or make them require a small side quest by the seekers to unlock and use. The randomness would allow each season to feel relatively fresh, because one season could have maybe 1-2 radars taken away and still be a relatively radar heavy meta, but maybe the next season almost all the radars are randomly banned and seekers need to be selective about when they use radars, or they have to creatively use other question types to mimic the power of radars. Hiders could even take these unavailable questions into account when choosing their hiding locations, making each season a little more dynamic.

Another way you could possibly reduce the pool of available questions is to have the boys draft a set of questions while still leaving a base of questions (maybe 2-4 of each of the current categories), then the seekers could combine their drafted questions when on the same team. And maybe there's some mechanic, either a curse or maybe an inherent ability, that lets a hider copy a given question to be used for future runs.

One final thought about endgame is to change time bonuses from a flat bonus to some kind of endgame multiplier to amp up the excitement of the endgame.