Mystery Oracle
A cooperative lateral-thinking mystery. The Oracle knows exactly what happened and will only ever answer yes, no, or irrelevant.
The Curiosity
"Dark stories" puzzles need one person who knows the answer and has the patience for two hundred questions. That person is usually tired by question forty.
A language model has infinite patience. Could one model play the oracle, the fact-checker and the game master at once, without giving the game away?
The Build
Every question goes to a single model call wearing three hats. The Oracle answers YES, NO or IRRELEVANT against a hidden ground truth. The fact-checker notices when the players have just uncovered a key fact, even if they phrased it sideways. The game master drops hints, announces discoveries and delivers the verdict with some drama.
Players join a lobby, interrogate together in real time, unlock visual clues as facts fall, and end the game by proposing a theory. Sessions live in Firestore; the model calls run on the Flask service on Cloud Run.
The Result
Playable with friends on any phone. Scenarios are authored in a small admin tool, so a new mystery is text, an image and a list of key facts.
What We Learned
The hard part was never answering the questions. It was noticing when the players had already solved something and saying so at the right moment. Pacing, not knowledge, is what makes an oracle feel alive.