2022 was a memorable year for a variety of reasons, depending on who you ask. Eastern Europeans will have one answer while Pam in Human Resources will probably have a different one. In both cases, however, the answers affected the entire world.
Today, we’re mostly concerned with Pam’s answer – Wordle. We’re sure we aren’t the only ones who think the internet is a slightly different place since the viral word-guessing game dominated watercooler chatter.
According to Progress Bar 2023, we’re just about halfway through the year so it’s about time for another sickenly-addictive browser-based time-waster. Enter The Password Game from New York-based coder Neal Agarwal.
Clear your schedule
Before we’d entered a single character we recognised the potential damage this game could wreak on our productivity so we promised ourselves we’d only go at it for 15 minutes or until we got stuck. 85 minutes later, after suffering an unthinkable tragedy, we closed the tab and were left with a strange mix of sadness, regret, and mild annoyance.
The game starts by politely asking you to “Please choose a password.” Entering ‘Password#1’ immediately satisfied the first four ‘rules’ like any good password should. It’s at least 5 characters long and includes a number, an uppercase letter, and a special character. So far so good.
Rule 5 is where things started to get weird. “The digits in your password must add up to 25” is not a password rule we’ve seen before.
Things quickly descended into absurdity and before we knew it we were adding Roman numerals, including one of the game’s “sponsors”, and making sure the Roman numerals we added previously multiplied to 35.
Then it took us off-site, forcing us to first solve and then include the current Wordle answer followed by the name of the country which you’ll have to deduce based on a random Google Street View location. Luckily you’re still able to ‘walk around’ to find clues. We’ll admit we also had to look up what the current phase of the moon is before finding and adding it as an emoji.
If you’re using a Windows PC, the emoji shortcut is the Windows logo key + . (period). If you’re on an Apple PC it’s a little more complicated.
Don’t give up on your password too soon
You might think, as we did, that you’re toast when you get to Rule 16 (or thereabouts) and you have to include the next best move of a given chess board in algebraic chess notation. But we’d encourage you to press on, whether that be through luck or with the help of nextchessmove.com a, uh, friend.
Then you’ll meet Paul. He’s just an egg that hasn’t hatched at first so you’re tasked with adding him to your password to keep him safe. We were really looking forward to getting to know Paul better once he’d hatched but sadly disaster struck.
We couldn’t scramble to douse the flames fast enough so Paul’s precious life, along with our last bit of patience, perished in the ensuing blaze.
Stuff says: 10/10 – Would play again while the editor isn’t looking.