Turing's Escape

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam

What I Built

Turing's Escape is a single-file browser puzzle game set in a fictional 1954 cryptography station, built around one idea: a literal Turing Test. The player is a new recruit who has to clear three tests before going home — break a Caesar-shifted intercept, talk to two telegraph operators and work out which one is human, then decode a punched-tape Morse message to open the vault. The middle test is the whole point: one operator's replies are scripted, the other's come live from Google's Gemini API, re-randomized every playthrough, and the player has to guess which is which with no hint beyond the conversation itself.
It ties into the jam themes on three levels at once rather than one per box: the "longest day" setting (a desk-lamp lit case file on the solstice night, light pooling against the dark edges of the page), the Alan Turing tribute (explained fully below), and a closing dedication that quietly lets Pride Month and Turing's own history sit in the same place, since June is both.
Play it: https://rahadbhuiya.itch.io/turings-escape
Built with: HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, Google Gemini API — no backend, no build step, no framework.

Code

github: https://github.com/rahadbhuiya/turings-escape

How I Built It

Most jam entries treat their bonus categories as separate boxes to check: a Turing reference bolted onto otherwise generic gameplay, an AI API called once for a line of flavor text nobody reads twice. The decision that shaped everything else here was refusing to do that — building one mechanic that was simultaneously the theme, the tribute, and the AI integration, so pulling out any single piece would break the game rather than just shrink a credits screen. The other honest constraint was a five-day window and a zero-dollar API budget, which ruled out a backend, paid models, and any art we didn't have time to make.
What that left is a single static HTML file: no server, no database, no build step. The state machine, all three puzzle modules, and a small WebAudio engine that synthesizes every sound effect on the fly (there are no audio asset files in the project at all) run entirely client-side in vanilla JavaScript.

The only network call the game ever makes is the one outbound request to Gemini, for the live half of the Turing Test puzzle — everything else, including the entire "human" side of that same conversation, is local and offline by design. That made the game trivial to deploy as one file and just as trivial to demo with no internet connection at all, if a key isn't on hand.

Prize Category

Best Ode to Alan Turing — Turing isn't a skin on top of a generic escape room here; he's the reason the central mechanic exists. His 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," asked whether a human judge could reliably tell a machine from a person through conversation alone — that question is the entire second test in this game. We chose not to put Turing on stage as a speaking character; he never appears, and nothing invents a quote in his name. Instead the closing screen dedicates the game to him as history rather than fiction: breaking Enigma, the 1950 paper, his 1952 prosecution for being gay under then-current UK law, and his death two years later at forty-one. It's also why the visuals are paper, typewriter type, and rubber stamps instead of a green-phosphor hacker terminal — interactive CRT screens barely existed yet in 1954, so the case-file look is the one actually true to his era, not just the one that reads as "computer-y" now.

Best Google AI Usage — One of the two operator lines, randomized to Line A or Line B every playthrough, is answered live by Google's Gemini API (gemini-2.5-flash) rather than pre-written. Every player message goes out with a system instruction that puts the model in character as a 1954 telegraph operator and tells it never to reveal it's an AI; whatever comes back streams straight into the chat log, unedited. Flash and Flash-Lite are the tiers Google currently leaves open for free-tier use, with Pro held back for paid accounts, which made Flash the only realistic choice on a zero-budget build. Because a live demo in front of judges is the worst place for a network call to fail, every Gemini request is wrapped end to end — a missing key, a failed fetch, a rate limit, or an empty response all fall through silently to a pool of scripted lines tuned to feel just slightly too smooth and agreeable, the uncanny-valley opposite of the deliberately imperfect lines written for the human side. The AI is real and load-bearing for the puzzle, but never a single point of failure for the submission itself.