puzzlinks.com: An all-purpose puzzle blog.

The URL Riddle

I got an email about a new site called The URL Riddle. It’s one of those sites where each page presents you with a riddle and the answer to the riddle is the next page that you need to go to.

The author is looking for feedback, so post any thoughts on the site here. One thing that I noticed was that on sites like this, players can often feel like they are making no progress. It’s often good to have pages up for answers that players are likely to guess with a short message and maybe another hint. I’ve emailed the author with this suggestion, so maybe we eill see improvements soon.

Tags: online,puzzles

Posted by Josh in Website (Tuesday September 2, 2008 at 10:39 am)
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Online Puzzles

There always seems to be more and more of these popping up, so I guess they deserve a mention.

Online puzzles are web-based puzzle games where solving puzzles leads you through a series of web pages. For each page in an online puzzle, the goal is “to get to the next page” but how exactly you manage to do that varies from page to page. Often you will have to click somewhere on the page and then enter a password, but you’re just as likely to have to enter a new URL suggested by the puzzle on the page. Often, you will have to look at the page source or find a hidden file. The challenge of the puzzles, more than anything else, is figuring out what exactly you have to do.

I think the most famous example of this game is notpron, which I played for a few screens. Then I reached a screen that seemed to want me to use a program that comes with Windows, and well… I’m not a Windows user and that was that.

There are dozens of this kind of game on the internet now. Most of them are trying to get a piece of the success of notpron. You can find a good list on the wikipedia page.