CCARS14 - GeoCrash Mystery Cache

Thats the first thing I thought when I tried playing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic text adventure (1984) when I was 12 years old. I got far enough to make it out of the house, but quickly met my demise half a hundred times trying to make something happen. Well, I never became a video game designer, as was my dream job for years, but leave it to Geocaching to allow me to try my hand at it finally.

This puzzle cache contains a desk puzzle and a field puzzle.The desk puzzle is a text adventure running on the Quest platform. You wake up in a car, crashed as you raced to get FTF on a new cache published in Kananaskis. Can you still get FTF? Or will you ever cache again!? Complete the game and the series of puzzles to unlock the cache's final coordinates. The game can be accessed by clicking on the picture below. Pay attention, maybe something will be useful in the field!

You can die in the game, being forced to start over, so save often. Unfortunately, saving is a little bit of a pain as you always overwrite your previous save. Don't worry, there is no way you can get 'stuck' and do something that makes the game unwinnable, unless you start dropping items (so don't, your knapsack is like Hermione's). So save often and don't be afraid to try stupid things in the face of danger, that is where the humour is. It's a game afterall.

Alternatively, you can download the Quest client and the game along with it. Not only will the game run smoother (most playtesting has been done on the client) and faster (circumvent the interwebs), but you get an undo feature (not useful if you are dead) plus a better save function that can save multiple files.

The field puzzle should be an easy one if you come prepared. It parallels the final puzzle inside the game. See the hint before you leave if you don't want to make two trips. When you get to the cache, DO NOT USE FORCE OF ANY KIND! Follow the instructions at the end of the game, and inside the container.

You shouldn't need this, but...

Some Troubleshooting:

Some people have had trouble properly loading the game. A picture of what your screen should look like when you are playing the game is below. It has taken some (me included) up to 40s for this screen to fully load. It also seems that Mac users running on safari may also have issues getting it to look like this with the 'toolbar' on the right. Not having the toolbar makes this game nearly impossible, like old school text adventures! If you are having this problem on a mac, downloading the client may fix this, but I can't confirm myself.