Cyber Escape Room

• 

  Beat the Hackers

• 

  Terminal

// Inspiration : Inspired by the growing need for practical cybersecurity education and the popularity of escape rooms, this project aims to create an interactive learning experience that is accessible offline. The idea was to combine real-time AI puzzle generation with hands-on cybersecurity challenges in a terminal environment.

// What it does : Cyber Escape Room is a terminal-based offline game where players solve dynamically generated cybersecurity riddles, Linux command puzzles, and network security scenarios. The GPT-OSS model generates the challenges, adapts difficulty, and provides hints or explanations—all without internet connectivity—to simulate real incident response situations.

// How we built it : The core engine is built in Python and connects to a local GPT-OSS model via API requests. The game flow handles timed challenges, user input, answer validation, and scoring. It features diverse challenge categories such as phishing detection, suspicious logs, and encryption analysis. We implemented a leaderboard system storing scores locally to encourage replayability.

// Challenges we ran into : Handling meaningful answer evaluation from AI responses required crafting careful prompts to accept valid answer variants. Managing time limits and smooth user experience in the terminal was tricky to keep engaging without frustration. Ensuring challenge diversity and avoiding repetitive puzzles also took iterative prompt tuning.

// Accomplishments that we're proud of : We succeeded in creating a fully offline, AI-driven cybersecurity escape room that adapts to player skill and dynamically generates fresh puzzles every session. The seamless integration of AI to evaluate and explain answers in a retro terminal interface is a standout feature.

// What we learned : This project taught us how to leverage local large language models for interactive real-time applications, prompt engineering for concise and accurate evaluations, and designing engaging educational games in constrained environments.

// What's next for Cyber Escape Room : We plan to add multiplayer or co-op modes, support more cybersecurity domains, and refine challenge difficulty progression. Future versions could include more detailed tutorials, logging practice, and integration with real system monitoring tools for immersive training.

Built With

• gpt-oss:20b
• json
• ollama
• python
• rest-api
• terminal