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Solution: The Password Game
Answer: MINECRAFT

Written by The Enigmatologists

You are greeted with a text box labeled Enter the Password. Upon entering a password, one of two things will happen. If the password is invalid, you will be told your password violates certain "rules". For example, the password Password violates rules #1, #2, and #4.

There are 5 rules, as follows, which you must determine through experimentation.

  1. The password must be at least 9 characters long.
  2. The password must not contain the letter W (case-insensitive).
  3. The password must not contain two vowels back-to-back.
  4. The password must contain the letter E (case-insensitive).
  5. The password must not contain any numbers.

If you enter a "correct" password, you will be met with an image resembling a computer file containing images. These images reference various video games. In particular, the games are (in order): Magicka, Dying Light, Overcooked! 2, Cyberpunk 2077, War Thunder, Fortnite, and The Sims. If you type these games into the password checker, you'll find that they all violate at least one rule but not told which. Since we've deduced the rules, we can determine which rules the game names violate, anyways.

Game Rule(s) Broken
Magicka 1, 4
Dying Light 4
Overcooked! 2 3, 5
Cyberpunk 2077 5
War Thunder 2
Fortnite 1
The Sims 1

If you index into the game name by the number(s) of the rule(s) that are broken, you obtain the answer, MINECRAFT.

Authors' Notes

This puzzle took heavy inspiration from neal.fun's The Password Game, a game about making increasingly absurd passwords using increasingly absurd rules. I was inspired to write a blackbox puzzle while looking at the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt's "Changes", "Combat Roller", and "Nobody Knows What Your Perfect Puzzle Is, But You Will After Answering These Nine Questions". This was my first puzzle ever, and went through a couple different versions (with different rules!). Playtesting showed that having 64 games to sort through with only one (Terraria at the time) not breaking any rules wasn’t fun and too guessable.

Fun Fact: The most common password was "Magicka", followed by "a", then "Dying Light". Over 20,000 passwords were guessed across all teams.

Funner fact: There was originally going to be an alternate solution, where you got the answer by resetting your team’s password (talk about meta!), but I couldn't get it to work.