The Password Game

The Password Game is a web-based puzzle video game. The player is tasked with typing a password in an input box. The game has a total of 35 rules that the password must follow and which appear in a specific order. As the player changes the password to comply with the first rule, a second one appears, and so on.

For each additional rule, the player must follow all the previous ones to progress, which can cause conflict. When all 35 rules are fulfilled, the player is able to confirm it as the final password and then must retype the password to complete the game.

fun. Agarwal had conceptualized the idea of the game as a parody of password policies as they got "weirder". According to Agarwal, "the final straw" that made him start to work on the game may have been when he was trying to create an account on a service and was told that his password was too long, mocking the notion of a password being "too secure". Development started in late April 2023 and took two months.

Agarwal mentioned that implementing regular expressions ("find" operations in strings) was hard, especially due to features of the game's text editor that show up as the player progresses, like making text bold or italic. Some of the game's password requirements were suggested to him on Twitter. Before release, Agarwal was unsure whether winning the game was possible; he attempted it unsuccessfully multiple times. The game was released on his website on June 27, 2023.

The Password Game went viral online soon after release. After its first day, the tweet announcing the game was retweeted over 11,000 times, and according to the developer, the game's website received over one million visits. The tweet received multiple comments discussing numbers that people reached in the game. As reported by Engadget, Twitter mentions of Agarwal were "full of people cursing him for creating" the game and people exclaiming having beaten it, to the surprise of the developer. As of October 2023, the game was visited over 10 million times.

Many critics have contrasted the standardness and simplicity of the game's initial password rules to the absurdity of the following ones. The sixteenth rule of the game, which is about finding the best chess move in a specific position, was considered the most challenging by PCGamesN and made other reviewers give up the game. While TechRadar and The Indian Express deemed The Password Game to be a good way to kill time, PC Gamer called it "the evilest will-breaking browser game to exist". The game was regarded by PCGamesN as possibly "one of the most inventive experiences of the year".