The Password Game is the new, weirder, harder Wordle
The password game takes you on a journey across the internet in an attempt to come up with a password that meets very specific requirements. What is today word answer? The current position of the moon? A specific chess move? What do these have in common? You must include the answers in your new password. (And the moon phase should be in the form of an emoji.) Google is your friend in trying to meet Neal Agarwal‘s increasingly absurd password requirement rules.
Agarwal released The password game on its website on Tuesday, where it will be available to play through your browser. Here’s how it works: The game starts on a mostly blank page with an input box: Choose a password. The only requirement is that it must be five letters. The following few requirements are recognizable: a number, a capital letter, a special character. And then the instructions pile up, getting weirder and sometimes extremely challenging. The password game broke me, for example, when I had to come up with the best chess move on a certain board.
Agarwal told Polygon it took two months to make The password game, which he began developing at the end of April. “The idea itself has been on my bucket list for years, and with password rules on the internet getting weirder, I felt like now would be a good time to finally make it,” he said in an email.
Agarwal’s first tweet on Tuesday has racked up more than 11,000 retweets as players brag about their achievements or lament their shortcomings in the comments. (I can say this because I’m inadequate too, people – I just need to settle rule 16.) Some of the rules were suggestions from Twitter, also: Agarwal asked users for help last month. For example, this is where the Geoguessr rule comes from.
The password game got so hard that even Agarwal hasn’t beat his fiendish lines — he’s only played it to line 28. “I love that people find ways to beat it. I tried several times before giving up,” he said. “When I released it, I wasn’t sure it was possible. But if you challenge the internet, they will find a way.”
It’s the sort of brilliant game that’s simple on the surface, with plenty of secrets beneath the layers. Part of the surprise is also in how funny and silly it is – it’s a comedy set in a user interface. Who knows? Good, The password game has had more than a million visits since it was released Tuesday, Agarwal said, so a lot of people know about it now. The appeal of the game also calls people like word: It’s something made to share with friends.