The Password Game will help you generate the strongest possible password. But, at what cost?
This new free title from developer Neal Agarwal feels like an attempt to take every Wordle-like, throw them in a blender, and serve up the resulting sadistic smoothie. The browser-based game starts out innocently enough, offering the simple prompt: "Please choose a password." Once you begin to type, a red text box appears beneath the entry bar, informing you of Rule 1: "Your password must be at least five characters." The second rule requires that you include a number, the third instructs you to add an uppercase letter, and the fourth insists on a special character. None of these are a big deal. If you've made a password before, this is standard stuff.
But, Rule 5 is where the game reveals its true, torturous nature. This edict demands that, "The digits in your password must add up to 25." At this point in a recent attempt, I was working with the password St@mp99. Those digits already equal 18, so I threw a 7 on the end to get it to the threshold. The game only gets more dastardly from there. Some are simple enough, like its demand that you add a Roman numeral, or an egg emoji, or incorporate one of the game's three "sponsors" — Pepsi, Starbucks, or McDonalds — into your password. These don't take much thought (though the game will circle back to these innocuous choices later on).
Others feel a little like trying to solve an escape room in which the entirety of the internet is fair game. I said above that The Password Game feels like it incorporates every Wordle-like and, in the case of Wordle, it does that literally, requiring you to add the day's Wordle solution to your password.
Or, if you're playing The Password Game on a computer, you may hit a snag when you discover Rule #13, the password must include the emoji for the current phase of the moon. Luckily, you can solve that by simply Googling "waxing gibbous moon emoji" and copying and pasting the emoji into the bar, but others aren't so simple. For another rule, you’re given a Google Street View of a location somewhere in the world and told to add the country name to your password. I did my best Rainbolt impression, but I was scrambling for every context clue I could find. Is that Arabic script on the sign in the distance? Will searching "black obelisk with cherubs playing trumpets on it in front of a long white building" yield anything remotely useful? Sometimes you'll get a more obvious clue, but then you're moving on to another that might, for example, have you learning algebraic chess notation so you can input the best possible move to play in response to a randomized chess board.
The great thing about the whole internet being the escape room is that there are often websites designed to specifically address the problems the game is presenting you. Others, not so much. My longest run the day I started playing ended when I ran into a phase that inserted flame emojis into my entry bar and instructed me to put out the fire as it burned through all my progress. The fires populated faster than I could delete them, and I couldn't stop it in time and got a Dark Souls-style game over screen. I doubted whether it was even possible to progress beyond this point until I saw a tweet from Agarwal about people having already finished the game. I went back in a couple days later and lost to the fires one more time before deciding to implement a containment strategy. I added a bunch of underscores at regular intervals throughout the password, which allowed me to haphazardly extinguish the flames when they appeared without touching any load-bearing parts of the password. A strategic victory.
Shortly after that, though, the egg the game handed me early on hatched into a chicken emoji which demanded three green worm emojis per minute. Thinking I was smart, I copied and pasted a few dozen into the entry bar before moving on to the Herculean task of locating a YouTube video with a down-to-the-second specific runtime. Unfortunately, another Dark Souls-style bar popped up, announcing that Paul had died from being overfed. That's enough of that for one day.
It makes sense that The Password Game nods to Dark Souls because that's the game that feels closest to this. Not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of spirit. Like the developers at FromSoftware, Agarwal seems to be a troll at heart. The joke is on all of us frantically deleting fire emojis and overfeeding emoji chickens.