Kirsty has just started getting into this amazing alternate reality puzzle adventure game Perplex City and I have to say I’m hooked too.

The basic story is that the Receda Cube (an unusual artifact) has been stolen from Perplex City (an alternate reality) and hidden somewhere on Earth. All you have to do is find it and win £100,000! Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.

To get started you need to buy some of the 256 puzzle cards from Firebox (my favourite toyshop) and solve the clues which you enter into the website at PerplexCity.com to gain points. Some cards give you info about the theft of the cube, some tell you about Perplex City, while others point you to phone numbers and websites that expand the story further! Combined with real-life radio interviews, newspaper ads and events in London & New York (so far) the game demands a great deal of time and skill in solving mazes, crosswords, illusions, etc.

People from all over the world are now invloved in this quest and have helped to further the story significantly. To find out the story so far and the incredible puzzles that have already been solved, Click Here.

To highlight quite how brilliant the game is, here is a quick example: one of the characters in the game developed a computer programme before he died which was posted on ‘his’ website (available to all at www.salkfamily.com). Players found that it was a series of invisible mazes and by running the programme on Apple powerbook computers, they could guide a ball around the maze just by using the inertia sensors and tilting the laptop! After fully mapping the mazes and stacking them ontop of each other they found various links to hidden urls on the website which unlocked scraps of email conversations, which in turn led to further clues. Incredible eh? and that’s just a small portion of what’s happened so far. Check it out, but make sure you have plenty of time on your hands!