A kitchen table covered in someone else’s homework
Sam grew up in a house of teachers. Both of his parents taught — one primary, one secondary — and the marking never really stopped. Sunday evenings were lesson planning. Half-terms were for catching up. What stayed with him was not the workload, though. It was the way both of them lit up describing the student who had spent an entire year insisting they were no good at this, and then, one ordinary afternoon, simply was not that student any more.
His parents chased that moment for thirty years. Medicine handed Sam a second education in the same problem: years spent memorising things that never quite stuck until the day a patient in front of him made them matter.
A tutor, and a classroom in Taiwan
Mitch tutored throughout university — maths, physics, whatever paid the rent — and then went to Taiwan to teach English to rooms full of teenagers. He kept meeting the same student, over and over, in two languages: the one who had decided early and permanently that they could not do a subject.
Almost none of them were right. They had simply never been given a reason to want the answer. And the breakthroughs, when they came, almost never arrived during the lesson he had carefully planned. They arrived during the game he invented to fill the last ten minutes.
Then, an escape room
We have done a lot of escape rooms together. What struck us, eventually, was that nobody inside one has to be told to concentrate. Nobody asks whether it will be on the exam. Grown adults who will cheerfully tell you they hate puzzles spend twenty minutes arguing about a substitution cipher and walk out calling it the best evening they have had all year.
Strip away the theming and an escape room is just a problem set with honest feedback. The lock opens, or it does not. No red pen. No grade. Try again. So we asked the obvious question: what if the puzzle taught something?
What we built
A Cryptic Learning game is a sequence of hand-made puzzles — ciphers, riddles, logic, deduction — with a story that unfolds in the cutscenes between them. Underneath each puzzle sits real curriculum: the chemistry, the history, the grammar. Students do not grind through it. They solve it, and then they ask for the next one.
We aim squarely at the subjects students bounce off first, the ones that look dry until somebody finally shows you the door they unlock. That is the whole company. Two people who think the next generation deserves to be curious about more than we were.