La Ricetta Perduta - IDEATION + PRODUCTION
2025, Personal Project
La Ricetta Perduta
A personalised escape game I made as a birthday gift for my partner, built around the hunt for a lost recipe. It took him on foot across London, from Monument up to Highbury & Islington, with a puzzle to solve at every stop. Each one he cracked won him an ingredient, a slice of pizza, and a clue to where he was headed next. There was one rule he wasn’t thrilled about: get an answer wrong, and a slice of pineapple went on the pizza.
Nearly all of it I made myself — the story, the puzzles, the props, the artwork. The code was the part I couldn’t do alone. With no coding background, I used AI to help me build an interactive WhatsApp bot (on Replit and Twilio) that ran the game as a conversation in the voice of his favourite historian, Alessandro Barbero. I wrote the script, and used AI to help it sound like him. The timeline was tight, so I also used AI to skip the bits that weren’t worth making by hand: a few images like the fake basil seed packet, quick references to work from, and a short film made in Google Veo.
The ending had a twist. The “lost recipe book” he’d been chasing all day turned out to be full of memories from the people who love him. The recipe was never pizza. It was him, the missing ingredient that brought everyone together.
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A personalised escape game I made as a birthday gift for my partner, built around the hunt for a lost recipe. It took him on foot across London, from Monument up to Highbury & Islington, with a puzzle to solve at every stop. Each one he cracked won him an ingredient, a slice of pizza, and a clue to where he was headed next. There was one rule he wasn’t thrilled about: get an answer wrong, and a slice of pineapple went on the pizza.
Nearly all of it I made myself — the story, the puzzles, the props, the artwork. The code was the part I couldn’t do alone. With no coding background, I used AI to help me build an interactive WhatsApp bot (on Replit and Twilio) that ran the game as a conversation in the voice of his favourite historian, Alessandro Barbero. I wrote the script, and used AI to help it sound like him. The timeline was tight, so I also used AI to skip the bits that weren’t worth making by hand: a few images like the fake basil seed packet, quick references to work from, and a short film made in Google Veo.
The ending had a twist. The “lost recipe book” he’d been chasing all day turned out to be full of memories from the people who love him. The recipe was never pizza. It was him, the missing ingredient that brought everyone together.
