A real artifact from your phone — a Discord DM, a Free-Robux link, a Close-Friends story — lands on screen with 25 seconds on the clock. You pick. The screen reacts. One of three verdicts closes it: best, safe, or trap. No score. No lecture. The screen is the receipt.
Every run hands you a thing from your own screen — and shows what each move costs in the same chrome you live in. Discord with the blurple `BOT` pill. Roblox inventory rows with red TRADED 03:14 stamps. iOS Notification Center with the aurora wallpaper. Voice notes with a waveform that actually pulses. The artifact is the puzzle.
You wake up. Inventory's gone. Trace the chain — drop link, Vietnam login, recovery DM — find the earliest break point.
The .gg domain. The bot account. The "12 slots, 10 min" urgency. Three tells. Pick the one that saves you.
The Vietnam alert is the alarm. The "recovery" DM is the second scam. Knowing the order is the move.
You posted it to Close Friends. The list was wrong. By 7:14 AM Coach saw it. Now the audience is the puzzle.
Two pitches. One play. No repeats. The rhythm is the keypad — decode it before the screen locks for the night.
Polaroid evidence cards. One decoy. Drag four into the chain — and learn the earliest place you could've cut.
Each arc lives in its own color and trains one judgment call under a different kind of pressure. Rotate through all four or hammer the one your week looks like.
Free-Robux generators, recovery DMs, giveaway bots, fake brand deals. The bait wears real logos. The tell is small — a 1-letter URL swap, a channel joined 18 hours ago, an account 5 days old with 0 friends.
A friend changed your phone PIN as a joke. A cafeteria receipt is the combo. A voice note has the rhythm. A yearbook page is an acrostic. The wrong format locks the phone. The right one unlocks the artifact.
Scams move in stages — bait, login, drain, "recovery" scam, gift-card spiral. Break the Chain lays the timeline on screen and asks the player to find the earliest break point. Deepfake voice panic, hacked-friend DMs, marketplace escrow loops, gift-card spirals.
No scammers. No locks. Just the calls a 14-year-old has to make and can't unmake — the Close-Friends story to the wrong list, the drunk-ride home, the copied homework, the 911 at the party. Every answer has an audience.
Every run follows the same five-beat skeleton. The arc changes what's on screen; the rhythm stays — tight enough to play during a bus stop, familiar enough to replay until the read is automatic.
One sentence sets time and place. "11:42 PM. Recommended feed." The mood lands in a single beat.
One real phone object lands on screen — DM, story, receipt, voice note. You read it like your own phone.
Two to four choices. A pressure-bar counts down. Silence counts as the miss. Speed and accuracy both matter.
The screen reacts to your move. Wrong URL opens a password harvester. Wrong PIN locks the phone. Wrong reply screenshots into the class chat.
One personal insight closes the run. Specific to your choice. Useful next time the real version lands at 11 PM.
The choice that breaks the chain, decodes the lock, or protects the relationship cleanest. Full XP. A personal insight closes the run.
The choice that limits damage but leaves something on the table — a softer apology, a slower exit, a partial recovery. Replay to find the cleaner move.
Drained inventory. Locked phone. Class-chat screenshot already mutating. No shame screen. The artifact itself is the receipt. Replay anytime.
A quiz asks "which of the following is a phishing red flag?" and rewards the right vocabulary. Puzzle Rush asks "the artifact is on your screen — what do you do?" and rewards the right move. Vocabulary follows the move, not the other way around.
Parental control apps monitor what a teen does after the fact. Puzzle Rush is the opposite category — a skill-building simulator the teen plays themselves, before the moment hits. Nothing is logged to the teen. Parents do not see decisions. The optional weekly digest is aggregate progress only.
A safety curriculum gives a lesson, then a worksheet. Puzzle Rush gives an artifact, then a verdict. The lesson lives inside the consequence on screen — the drained inventory, the locked phone, the class chat reacting. The receipt at the end names what just happened so it sticks.
Replays are designed to surface the tell the teen missed, not to grind XP. A teen who beats a run with the best verdict has no reason to replay it — they go pick a different arc. Pressure is the teacher, repetition is the polish.
Scams and social calls do not arrive at 3 PM during a worksheet. They arrive at 11:42 PM in a Discord DM. The 25-second timer is not a gimmick — it makes the run feel like the moment it's preparing for. Decisions trained under time pressure transfer to time pressure. Calm-room training does not.
Phishing is not email anymore — 9 of 10 attacks start in messaging apps (Verizon DBIR 2025). Artifacts are built from the same surfaces — Discord, Roblox, Instagram, YouTube — so the pattern transfers without translation. The spotlight-effect research (Gilovich, 2000) grounds the Dilemmas arc: teens overestimate how visible their mistakes are by ~50%.
40 runs free in the public web demo. Founding players keep mobile access free for life when the app ships.
Start a Puzzle Rush — Free25-second decisions · anonymous · replay anytime.