Boltwick: Locked Room Cases

A door bolted on the inside. Windows painted shut two summers ago. One key, in a dead man's waistcoat pocket. Snow across the only path, unmarked. And somebody got in. Boltwick does not ask who. In most of these rooms you are told who on the first page, and it changes nothing. It asks HOW — and it gives you everything you need to work it out. WHAT EACH ROOM GIVES YOU • THE SITUATION — what happened, and where, written the way a report would have been written at the time. • THE SEAL — the conditions that make the room impossible, listed one by one. Every one of them was true at the same moment. That is the problem. • ESTABLISHED FACTS — the things that were measured, timed, photographed or sworn to. Nothing here is a trick. • FIVE EXPLANATIONS — and exactly one of them survives all of it. THREE ATTEMPTS, AND BEING WRONG IS WORTH SOMETHING You get three. A wrong explanation is not a wasted turn: the room tells you precisely why that method fails — the bolt is the wrong pattern, the duct is four inches, the putty would still be sticky in February — and your next guess is a better one. That is the whole design. Most of the writing in this app is in the refutations. STUCK BEFORE YOU START? Rule a method out and read why it cannot be the answer. It never costs you an attempt. Two are free every day, and if a video fails to load twice you get the ruling anyway — a hint you cannot have is worse than no hint at all. TWENTY ORIGINAL ROOMS A museum strongroom in Norfolk. A granary office over the Gloucester cut. A Speyside distillery in the snow. A cotton mill's pattern room. A cold store at minus twenty-two. A rock lighthouse in a force nine. Each one is fair: no secret passages invented in the last paragraph, no evidence you were never shown. BUILT FOR READING Dark by default, light if you prefer it, four text sizes. Every room is on your phone from the first launch, so you can read one with no connection; only the ads need the internet. Nothing is behind a paywall: every room, every answer and every full working is free. NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER Boltwick keeps what you have solved, what you tried and your streak on your own phone. There is no sign-in, none of it is uploaded or used to choose an ad, and uninstalling deletes it. The free version is paid for by ads from Google AdMob, which collects some device data to serve them (see Data safety and the privacy policy), and you can review or change your ad choices from Settings at any time. Every person, place and crime in Boltwick is invented. The rooms are original fiction written for this app with the help of AI and checked before release. Nothing here is drawn from a real criminal case, and nothing here is an instruction for doing any of it.