The Disturbing Puzzle Game That Nobody Can Solve

On July 10th, 2014, a small, mysterious game called “Do Not Believe His Lies” was uploaded to the iOS app store. Since then, over 40,000 people have downloaded the app. Nobody has beaten it. Hell, nobody quite knows what it is, either.

Then, the game throws you its first riddle: The first puzzle stumped me for a while. I tried the time, AT&T, Share, Feedback. It turns out, you can only see the answer if you have your brightness on your phone all the way up. If you’re viewing this on a PC or a mobile device with the brightness turned up, the answer might be more immediately visible to you. Either way: this is just the first puzzle. Nothing major. The solution is: When you punch that in, the game automatically throws you the next puzzle: Morse! Pretty simple. The message translates to: So far, pretty easy. Then it gives you this riddle:This is where I got completely lost. I turned to the , and found that people have been posting there for the last eight months, diligently solving puzzles from this game. Some puzzles took months to figure out. For this one in particular, someone actually inverted the picture, cut it into squares, and rearranged it into the text. This is what it says: If you’re playing the game seriously, my bet is that you’re going to be inputting a looot of wrong answers—and therefore seeing a lot of ads. Every puzzle also gives you the option to purchase a hint. The hints aren’t solutions, but they do cost money. I do understand that the developer needs to make money off this game somehow, but it’s hard not to walk away with the sense that it was deliberately made difficult to try to squeeze as much money away from people as possible. Maybe that’s just me being cynical. And maybe it doesn’t matter in the end—the game is pretty damn good. Even though I’ve only played a small portion of it, the game managed to unsettle me. Now I’m eating all the mystery up.