The Lotus Loop Is Here: A Mystery Game That Made Our Team Question Reality
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The first thing you should know about The Lotus Loop is that it took us way longer to make than we planned. The second thing is that our designer now knows more about feng shui than anyone reasonably should.
The Lotus Loop is our newest mystery puzzle game, and it's a bit of a departure from what we've done before. It's a hybrid experience, part printable case file, part interactive digital investigation, set in an abandoned international school in Hong Kong. You play as a student named Maya Lin who wakes up with no memory, a courier box full of evidence she apparently collected herself, and a clock that won't stop reading 23:16.
What makes it different?
Most case file games give you a stack of documents and ask you to figure out whodunit. The Lotus Loop does that too, but it also gives you a fully interactive retro computer website where you browse password-protected student records, discover hidden files, and piece together a mystery that spans from 1990 to 2008.
The puzzles aren't your typical "find the hidden message" fare, either. You'll decode ciphers, cross-reference Chinese zodiac birth years with bagua trigram positions, deduce passwords from narrative clues, and solve a two-phase digital formation puzzle where you drag and drop seven names into an ancient eight-trigram array. If that sounds intense, that's because it is but the progressive three-tier hint system means you'll never hit a wall you can't get past.
The three endings
We're particularly proud of this part. Depending on what you discover and the choices you make, you'll reach one of three endings: the standard resolution, the true liberation ending, or a hidden secret ending that no hint in the game explicitly tells you about. We've already seen players debating which ending is the "real" one, which is exactly what we wanted.
Who it's for
If you enjoyed Post // Mortem and wished it had more puzzles and a digital component, this is your game. If you love escape rooms but want something you can play at home in your pyjamas, this is your game. If you've ever wanted to hack into a fake 1990s school database and feel like a genius for figuring out a password, this is very much your game.
1–4 players. Ages 12+. About 90–120 minutes. Instant PDF download.
