Escape House — a Desmos escape room, rebuilt as one offline file

The original is a Desmos activity: rooms, codes, items and flags all living inside a graphing calculator's expression list. This is a rebuild of it as a single 85,196-byte HTML file that opens with no network, no assets and no install — 21 rooms across three levels, six lock mechanics, the original's exact codes, and a three-tier hint system that reads your own save file to know which step you are stuck on.

1 · what the original actually is

The Desmos activity stores its whole game in the expression list. Reading the exported state gives the real structure — not what the screenshots look like, but what the author wired up:

The flags are brace-named, which is why naive grep misses them: the switch is u_{lightsOn}, the trapped door is u_{iceKey}, the dart is u_{sedDart}. Strip the braces and the whole dependency graph falls out of the click actions. Every code in this rebuild came out of that graph — 131 on the kitchen drawer, 962 on the bedroom keypad, 4 5 19 13 15 19 on the bookcase panel (A1Z26 for DESMOS), and 7:30 for the clock.

2 · the chain, as the author wired it

Eleven items, each one opening exactly one thing. Nothing is decorative: every item in the original's inventory has a consumer, and every consumer has a producer.

3 · six locks, none of them a text input

4 · the two mechanics the first pass missed

5 · the hint system

The request was a button for people “doing the thing and they don't know how to do”. A single “here's the answer” button fails that: it either spoils the puzzle or says nothing useful. So the hint is a ladder — three rungs per puzzle beat, and it knows which beats you have already passed.

How a hint is chosen

// one beat = one line of puzzle progress
HINTS[level] = [ { id, room, done(G), need(G), t:[rung1, rung2, rung3] } … ]

resolveStep():
  1. if a lock panel is open        → the beat that panel belongs to   (context wins)
  2. else first beat where          !done(G)  &&  need(G)              (never a step you cannot reach)
  3. else                           → "everything here is done, head for the exit"

escalation:  new beat → rung 1 · same beat again → rung 2 · again → rung 3 (capped)
idle:        55 s with no click → the button itself starts pulsing

Three properties that matter more than the wording:

32 beats across the three levels — 18 in the house, 7 in the lab, 7 in the vault. The counter (9 / 18) and the dots are the player's own progress bar; they are not decoration, they are the reason the ladder feels like help rather than a walkthrough.

6 · where this is not the original

7 · what broke, and what it taught

8 · evidence

Both copies are excluded from the site's skin injection (SKIP_PREFIX in theme-inject.py), so what the server sends is the file itself — no injected switcher floating over the inventory tray, no rewritten markup.

9 · what's next

• Wire the original's hardMode: one rung instead of three, for players who want the ladder to give only a direction.
• An 8×8 lights-out behind an “authentic” toggle, keeping 5×5 as the default.
• Re-draw the nine house rooms at the original's density — right now each room carries 3–6 props where the activity has 15–25.