Steemington Insane Asylum: Solved - The First 4 Rooms

Escape From Steemington Insane Asylum - Original Game here.

Why Did I Launch This Game?

I designed this game as an attempt to encourage users' further navigation and exploration of the steemit platform, to discover and participate in many of the other amazing offerings (outside of posting, commenting and curating) within the interface. 

As this is, for now, primarily a blogging platform, I liked the idea of creating puzzles that were diction focused, hopefully offer something interesting in the process.

Room 1 - CELL

How To Solve The Puzzle?

All of the puzzles' solutions were to be found within steemit. The first clue that alluded to this, was in the letter from yogi.artist, where "The Steemington Insane Asylum" was hyperlinked back to the steemit homepage. 

But why? 

This is where a little bit of a detective mindset proved useful. 

So, this link has taken us back to the steemit homepage, but there is so much information here......where do you even begin!! 

Ok, so, what might be useful if you are trying to look for something, In this case the answer to a specific question? - "What Title does the man, on the chair, being fed beans, go under?"

Guess what - Steemit has a search feature. 

I know that if I was looking for something on a content filled website, a search feature would be useful. 

Search is a detective's middle name after all! 

If I want to find an answer to something nowadays, like most people, one of the first things I do, is google it!

Ok, so we have a very useful feature that we can put to use. The search feature's icon is even a lovely little magnifying glass; Sherlock holmes's best friend!

@brianphobos left an interesting comment:

Now, what, might we search for? Key words perhaps?? 

Some words will likely return lots of hits, whilst others not so many. 

You might have had to do a few word searches, which might have frustrated some people (this is an insane asylum after all!) but once you had searched for either "chair" + "beans", or "man", "chair" + "beans", just a quick scan through of either the 1st, or 2nd search result (depending on which combination of words you searched for) would offer something very revealing.

Ok, so, this looks promising, let's take a closer look, by opening up the blog:

Aha!

Ok, now, onto room 2. 

Cell Block:

Now I must admit, the difficulty ramped up a little bit here. In fact, this is probably one of the harder rooms. On reflection, I may have in fact been a bit mean here. Oops! ლ( ◕ 益 ◕ ) ლ

(Apologies to all affected by the Insane Asylum!)

So, our detective/escapee has a new tool in their problem solving armoury. I wonder whether it will be useful again?

Admittedly, more tricky than before, and not quite so clear cut in it's solution provision, what we needed to do was to try word searching again, but in particular, searching for the phrase "money rolling in". This might have involved a little searching of key words and word blocks within the clue in Cell Block. 

This searching, might hopefully reveal to us, some hits, that provide further signs of confirmation, within the summary content again. 

So scanning through the first page of blogs, nothing really jumps out at us.....we might need to keep looking.....

This time the clue confirming detail is in the title of the blog, rather than the 2 line blog summary (I though i'd mix it up a little here, hehe) 

It's not so easy this time! However, if we click on to page 2 of the search, 2nd from top of the page, there is an interesting blog with the words "Psych Ward" in the title. 

What's another name for a psych ward, or psychiatric ward?

Ok, you needed to know that a psych ward is also called an Insane Asylum. Tricky, I admit!

The answer within the psych ward:

Yes, I know, that was a difficult one, but i'm afraid that's the nature of being locked in an Insane Asylum. 

Ok, now, on to Room 3

Boiler Room

Here, unfortunately, for our inmates, the "let's apply the approaches that we've used before" reasoning, doesn't work. 

Like the preceding rooms, this room was totally solvable with just the first clue, if you were at all familiar with 1337 speak, or leet speak as it's otherwise referred to -

So applying 1337 speak to the "08" in the first clue of this room - "08-server ID?"

"08-server" would be = Observer - right?  

Hmmm.....Observer I.D? 

Ok, what's another name for Observer that might be relevant to steemit? 

As James Brown so rightly put it - "Can i get a witness???!!!!"

Ok, I can get a witness....but which one? There's 50 of them! If only I had a number. How about 08?? 

Anyways, we'll come back to that in just a moment!

The inmates were struggled with this 1st clue, and, shocked by their captivity, weren't thinking along the lies of teamwork. 

As a result, I decided to setup the #steemitescapechallenge chat room on rocket.chat in the hope that I might to be able to encourage some joining of forces -

It was in the chat, that I dropped this clue -

A little later, I needed to drop a couple more clues into this puzzle. The first was the number 335, which if turned upside down, applied to leet speak, makes the word "See". What's another word the means "see"? 

See a pattern emerging here? 

Ok, that wasn't the easiest of clues, I realised, so I revealed another clue, shortly afterwards. 

This came in the form of a silhouette of a watch, on the left side wall. 

Well, what's another word for "watch"? 

I think I'm starting to see a pattern emerging here.

So, the word Witness becomes a prominent clue, not too mention that it's also highly relevant within steemit!

Recalling how this room was entirely solvable with just the first clue alone - "08-server ID?", we now have all of the information that we need.

Ok, so on to the fourth room

Bathroom

You can see that "tale" is in black, whilst all of the other words are white. There is a reason for this, but its not so obvious at first. 

I think that the inmates were struggling again here.....

With the payout window closing a few hours after this room opened, it wasn't long before I dropped the 2nd and 3rd clues, which I did at the same time. 

The 2nd clue was the icon of a wrench and screwdriver. 

Looks like a "tool" icon to me?!? 

And the other clue? 

That was "roelandp", who, if you aren't familiar (where have you been??!!) is an absolute shining star of a steemit dev!! 

So we have the word "tale", a tool icon and a steemit dev. Hmmm, of what use is this information??

What's another word for "tale"? 

We also have the "tool" icon and roelandp. If you didn't already know, then a quick search would reveal that roelandp has developed a range of cools apps for steemit, available at steemtools.com -

Ok, this is looking promising.....

But now, we need a name......Who's story are we trying to find?.......A whale's? 

Which one, there's quite a few of them!!

Back to the original clue.... 

It says - "The latest write up of whale's tale", not "a whale's tale". 

So it's being quite specific that whale is the name, not the description. 

Yes, "whale", is a steemit username.

So, there we go. That is how it was done.

---

In the true spirit of the asylum, I think that this challenge ended up driving a few people to the edges of Insanity and I would just like to say a big thank you, and respect to all of those who got involved and gave it a go, and for those hardcore inmates who stuck it out and kept going! 

A special mention and congratulations to @mistowed who secured 106.571 SBD - (100% of the total SBD rewards) for the first part of this escape challenge, through his unrelenting desire to free himself from the mad house, and also @the-future, who gave it a really good effort too. 

ALL SBD generated through the games and content within #steemitescapechallenge go directly into the escape games' participants' rewards kitty!

---

This is the first of these kind of games that I have ever designed, but I set out with the aim of providing a challenge. 

It was certainly a challenge on my end, in regards to trying to pitch it right, both making sure that it wasn't too easy. but also, not too difficult. 

In trying to pitch this at the right difficulty level, I would be really interested in hearing your feedback, now that you've seen how these puzzles were solved. All feedback would be really useful for future tweaks. Thank you.

---

Are you ready for the next room???