Escape Rooms
Sluice
A surge shuts you into the Ferrand pumping station, and the only way up runs through five of the dead engineer's machines; the exit code was hashed before the water came.
Sluice is a free escape room you play inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Five machines, one chain, and an exit code sealed before the outer gate dropped. Solo, 20–40m a run. No signup and no app — open it in your assistant, or paste the play prompt anywhere else.
- Players
- 1
- Length
- 20–40m
- Rating
- 12+
- Version
- 1.1.0
Works with ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini. Free, no signup.
Opens your assistant with the game loaded. ChatGPT usually runs it straight away; Claude waits for you to press send. Same link on your phone as on your desktop. Playing in Gemini? Tap Copy the play prompt and paste it into a new chat. What works where.
No web access, or want it as an installed app?
The game card is the entire game — every scene, rule and answer, about 13k characters. Paste it when your assistant can't browse the web. The Skill installs Sluice into Claude on any plan: download it, then turn on code execution under Settings → Capabilities and add it at Customize → Skills → + → Upload a skill.
How to start
- Open your AI. Start a new chat in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. No paid plan required.
- Paste the room card. The card commits the escape code to a SHA-256 hash, then drops the outer gate behind you.
- Work the mechanisms. Trace the circuit, order the valves, read the gauges, set the gears; each answer keys the next while the glass falls.
- Escape and verify. Say the code at the crown hatch, then hash the published reveal to check the seal held.
Questions
- Can an AI run a logic puzzle escape room?
- Yes, because it isn't the one solving. Elias Ferrand set the plant down in the order it must be worked, and every mechanism — the fuse board, the valve order, the gauge bank, the gear train, the plate on the crown hatch — already has its one answer written on the card. The station will not show you a machine until the one before it is solved, and it has no answer to give but the one Ferrand wrote down.
- How is the ending kept fair?
- The tide can't be argued with and neither can the code. Its SHA-256 fingerprint was fixed before the card shipped; the station reads that fingerprint to you as the outer gate falls, and once the run is over you hash the reveal and watch the two line up.
- Do I need to be good at puzzles?
- You need to be willing to be methodical. Nothing here is a cipher — it's a circuit to trace, five valves to sequence, a logic grid, a gear train, and an acrostic — and each has a three-step hint ladder plus an answer on request, so a stuck player pays in freeboard and keeps moving.
- What happens if I run out of time?
- The gallery goes under with you in it. At zero freeboard the water tops the last of the air and the run ends trapped, scoring nothing — a flooded gallery never scores above an open hatch. Say "save" at any point and the same mechanism, at the same freeboard, is waiting in a new chat.
- How close does the water actually get?
- The glass starts at 300 cm and only falls: 10 cm for a wrong answer, 25 cm for a hint, 50 cm to have a whole mechanism handed to you. Thinking is free. Buying all five answers outright costs 250 cm and still leaves you air; it is grinding every hint ladder to the bottom that drowns people.
12+ — themes of captivity and drowning; the fail state is a flooded gallery, and the engineer whose log you follow died in the well.