If you love puzzle games and monetary rewards, boy have we got a treat for you. An upcoming Steam title is offering one (1) Bitcoin to the first person who finishes it.
Montecrypto: The Bitcoin Enigma, apart from having an amusing name, contains 24 puzzles which you can choose to solve on your own or with others. It also gives you the ability to leave behind clues for other players to help them out or, if you’d prefer, throw them off the trail completely.
Played from a first-person perspective, the game is set in a maze and judging from the trailer, looks pretty sweet graphically. The game’s developers, Gem Rose Collective, say once the winning player solves all 24 puzzles, they receive an actual Bitcoin and the game is over.
The title is due out on February 20 and will only set you back $US1.99 ($2.51 AUD), so if you do happen to be the lucky winner, it’s a pretty good payoff. At the time of writing, a single Bitcoin is worth $12,747 AUD.
How hard is the game, you ask? Well, they reckon it’s pretty easy… If you’re a robot. “We would say it’s fairly simple. If you are an [artificial super intelligence],” the FAQ reads. “Otherwise, this game must be amongst the hardest you’ve ever played.”
Interestingly, no one knows who the team behind the game actually is. “We are trying to keep our identities secret for now,” they said in a press release.
But we can say we are a group of game developers and that we had a crazy idea for a game. As huge fans of treasure hunts we took inspiration from riddles like la chorette d’or (the golden owl), a statue of the owl was buried in 1993 at the same time a series of clues was published, and still nobody has solved the clues to find the owl and claim the 15kg (33lb) statue made of gold and silver.
According to the the FAQ, the team will reveal their identities once the bitcoin has been claimed. The page also provides a link to a GitHub page for something called btcrecover, which they say “might come in handy”.
According the description, btcrecover is “an open source Bitcoin wallet password and seed recovery tool designed for the case where you already know most of your password/seed, but need assistance in trying different possible combinations.”
In other words, it looks like this game will go beyond the fourth wall quite a bit, tasking you with gathering clues from all sorts of places outside the actual game. If you plan on getting involved, you’ll probably wanna brush up on Bitcoin wallets and other crypto tidbits.
You can suss out the game’s Steam page right here. Good luck, pals.
