Labyrinth (ThePuzzleFiles, 2006)

Labyrinth is a video game in the loosest sense.  It's one many of online puzzlefests which might loosely grouped under the genre of "tower games".  Tower games, some of the most famous being NotPron or TheFirstDoor, have a simple model; they are a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, accessible by browser, where answering each puzzle correctly gives you the URL to access the next.  They are usually plotless, and rarely give you much of a reward for completion (although I wouldn't really know, since I've never actually beaten one.)  The lure is the brutal difficulty, which can be quite legendary for some of these so-called games.

Labyrinth began as a contest, a sort of puzzle marathon.  The puzzles are mostly cryptographical in nature, with the answer to each being a word or phrase hidden in something as bewildering as a knitted thread.  The puzzles are always fair.  Certainly riddles like these could be made arbitrarily difficult, but that's never the case with Labyrinth.  Usually, when the rule for decoding comes, you'll know it right away, and you won't understand why you didn't see it all over the past week.  The game does have some mean tricks up its sleeve.  Like a real labyrinth, there are even dead ends, where a partially correct answer will lead you down a fruitless series of puzzles ending with a trite message telling you to turn around and find where you were mistaken.

Only 117 people, have beaten Labyrinth - I know because the game lists all of these out in a hall of fame.  I am not one of those people.  Only two people beat the game last year - obscurity is partly to blame, but still.  This is not for the faint of heart, but for the incredibly patient.  That said, the community of puzzle solvers is not an unwelcoming one.  A forum for tower games is often provided, where hints can be found.  Direct walkthroughs are usually not available, for good reason, since they very much defeat the purpose.

However, when a puzzle leaves you entirely helpless, and the forums give you nothing but the same seemingly-useless hint repeated, then you're bound to feel a bit of despair.  What's amazing about these games is that it's entirely possible to recover from this feeling, and gain that flash of insight when you least expect it.  Today, for example, while "researching" this blog post, I managed to solve a puzzle that had put me off the game for the past three years.  Now I'm hooked again.

Certainly tower games are not for everyone, but I'm always surprised at just how small the community is.  Certainly the name I've assigned them is not canonical, and they're a bit hard to Google ("online riddle games" might be the most popular moniker, but that it doesn't really do the games any favors).  But I've always considered them, and Labyrinth in particular, some of my favorite puzzle games, so I think they deserve much more attention.