Perita

Oculta—Hidden Online

This blog has seen a distinct lack of updates lately. That is because we have been rather busy with the development of a new escape room game: Oculta—Spanish for “hidden”.

Now, a little rant: the moniker escape room is a bit of a misnomer; in Oculta you do not have to escape any room—there is not even a room anywhere! But hanging onto names is a pointless exercise and let’s agree that a escape room game is just a series of puzzles tied loosely together with a storyline.

And that is what Oculta is in a nutshell: Alfredo is a worried father that has become estranged to his daughter Ariadna, an influencer, to the point that he no longer knows where she is. Being a computer neophyte, Alfredo has come to you for help in hopes that you will follow her trail through all the popular Internet sites she frequents and finally find her. You will need to reveal messages hidden in Instagram accounts, decipher coded images send by email, and discover her whereabouts so that Alfredo can stop worrying so much about her.

A screenshot of the starting point of Oculta. There is a photo of a mature man with a worried expression above the following text in Spanish: “¡Hola! Mi nombre es Alfredo. Os escribo en este foro porque llevo mucho tiempo sin poder hablar con mi hija Ariadna, y estoy muy preocupado. No sé dónde está.”
Starting point of Oculta: Alfredo asking us to help him find his missing daughter.

This game has been a bit of departure from our usual route because it is the first that he have developed with another group, Customazed. Customazed is a small operation with years of experience building customized escape rooms for companies, and recently has decided to tackle the virtual space all well. They are the original authors of Oculta and have cleverly designed every puzzle; our job has been to simply write the JavaScript required to bring their idea to the web.

Unfortunately, that means that we had to put Flick Karts on hold until we have finished Oculta. But now is time to pick it up again and we hope to release the first alpha version soon.

Time will tell.