Rose Cottage
Rose Cottage is a year-long ARG, developed at Alice & Smith under YHP’s Metalab umbrella, that tasks you to solve supernatural deaths using your wits, research skills and puzzle acumen. It is completely free and played on your browser.
I was tasked to create complex cases designed around internet research and ciphers. The goal was to create one main case per month with smaller “cold” cases designed in between, making sure to always be a month ahead of release.
The game is set in Alice & Smith’s Black Watchmen universe and I worked with its original puzzle designer, Patrick Greatbatch, to design some really unique puzzle journeys.
During my work on this project, I even designed and created a website for a fake cult and various tools to help with the creation of our puzzles, such as my mantra creator in Excel.
Unfortunately, the project is currently on hiatus, but you can still play the current missions here:
Rose Cottage
(Account creation required)
Rose Cottage is set in Alice & Smith's The Black Watchmen universe, after the events of NITE Team 4 that caused the organization to fall into disarray. In this game you play as a private investigator/coroner working at Rose Cottage, a shadowy detective agency masquerading as a dairy farm that investigates strange murders, no questions asked. Most, if not all, cases deal with supernatural beings and phenomena that aren't out of place for Black Watchmen players. The general idea was to create a year long advent calendar, counting down until the release of a new PC game which would continue the Black Watchmen story.
In the morgue lies a secretary desk containing all the clues to help you solve the case. The gameplay was very similar to Chapters: players analyzed the clues they were given and answered a prompt given by their case worker. We utilized audio and visual clues, but all cases required outside research to solve as they were based on real events or places. And like Chapters, we used Playfab XR to store mission data, which we could then change on the fly depending on player feedback or playtesting.
A challenge I designed where the player must solve an "Einstein" logic puzzle to craft an antidote out of these noxious chemicals.
This is a pamphlet from another case involving a dangerous religious cult. Spoilers for the puzzle solution! For this one, I wanted to use a reverse book cipher, so instead of using numbers to find letters in a book to spell out a coded phrase, I wanted players to find a word in a bible passage and count its position, which would give out a phone number in the end. Players would call the number and be given the URL to the cult's website. You can see in the next image the tool I created in Excel to make this cipher easy to use and reuse. Try to solve it before looking at the next image!
This is a portion of the tool I created to make the reverse book cipher. It contains every bible passage in the Book of Genesis. Here's how it works: first you'd feed the phrase you wanted to scan on the left side, you would then input a number at the top of each column from 1 to 9. The sheet would then spit out the word at that number's position inside the phrase. If the word was used more than once in the phrase, it would show up as Red, to let you know to not use it. You would then craft a sentence, using one word per column, which would become your key phrase. On the left of the phrases in excel, you'd see the bible passage number that would be added to the cipher.
The front page for the cult's website I created in WordPress. The site is peppered with religious imagery and platitudes, and it's hiding coded messages in plain sight, for the cult leaders who are in the know. I would put the site's URL here, but that's no fun. Call the number in the pamphlet to get it!