All projects

CompleteUpdated Added

The Quiet Hour

A point-and-click escape room set in a friend's study: turn between four walls, inspect and collect objects, and combine clues to work out the door code. All of the artwork is SVG drawn in code.

Visit The Quiet Hour (opens in a new tab)Visit GitHub Repo (opens in a new tab)

About this project

This is a Claude Code experiment where I wanted to see how well Claude Code could handle a particular genre of puzzle game: virtual escape rooms. Could it handle the complex interactions between the various persistent elements of multiple puzzles in a room while also balancing a challenging and enjoyable experience?

What I found was that while Claude Code was able to handle the multiple different elements present in the escape room (different puzzles, different objects, states of interaction), it did not really land well on the "puzzle" challenge part of the game. Many of the puzzles were pretty straightforward: put the square peg into the square hole. There were some puzzles that felt like a medium challenge and could have been a bit clever, but Claude Code chose to add many obvious hints that pretty much held my hand as I played through the game. There was a lot of "You found object ABC which makes you recall puzzle XYZ on the other side of the room. Perhaps using ABC on XYZ will be beneficial!" instead of just "You found object ABC" and then trusting that the player will reason that they should try using it on XYZ. I hope that future models and versions of Claude Code can better build this intuition for the genre of challenging but solvable puzzles.

Screenshots

An inspection window over the desk wall describing a pen cup with a brass key inside and a Take the brass key button. (view full size)
Inspecting the pen cup on the desk reveals the brass key that opens the first drawer.
A dialog titled The Drawer Opens listing a magnifying glass, a dead flashlight and a handwritten note about the seasons. (view full size)
Using the brass key on the desk drawer yields two items and the first clue.
The desk wall with a window, lamp, puzzle box, notebook and an opened drawer, with the inventory bar below showing a magnifying glass and flashlight. (view full size)
The desk wall after the tutorial step, with the collected items in the inventory bar.

Resources