Hickory Dickory Dock Agatha Christie

How Hickory Dickory Dock Worked

Hickory Dickory Dock was an alternate reality game released in 2023 tied to Agatha Christie's novel One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. It was an ARG, meaning it existed across multiple channels — websites, social media, voice messages, phone numbers, and even physical mail — and players had to piece together a mystery by solving puzzles. It was designed as a promotional experience for the audiobook and the broader Christie brand, but it stood on its own as a fully realized puzzle hunt. The entry point was a website that looked like a mundane clock repair shop. You didn't get a tutorial. You didn't get hand-holding. The only instruction was implicit: start looking at the clock on the page, start clicking things, see what responds. That was the entire onboarding. If you were used to modern games with quest markers and objectives, you'd feel lost immediately. That was by design. Once you entered the site, you'd find phone numbers listed in the page source or hidden in images. Calling those numbers would connect you to pre-recorded voice messages, sometimes in character as characters from the novel, sometimes giving cryptic clues. Some numbers required you to enter a PIN before accessing the message. The PINs were never given directly. They were encoded in earlier clues — dates, times, book references, or patterns found on the website itself.

I spent about three hours just trying to figure out why one particular phone number wasn't accepting the code I'd derived. Turns out the code had been updated mid-game by the creators. The original source I was using — a player-maintained wiki — hadn't synced the change yet. I ended up calling the number repeatedly until I accidentally hit the right sequence on the third try, which was annoying but also the exact kind of friction the game was built around. It forces you to engage with the material rather than just look up the answer.

The Puzzle Structure

The ARG was divided into phases. The first phase introduced you to the premise: a clockmaker connected to the story's events has left behind a series of clues, and you're essentially helping solve the murder before the detective does. Each phase unlocked the next by requiring a collective solution. The puzzles ranged from simple cipher work — substitution ciphers, Atbash, Morse code — to more involved challenges that required understanding the plot of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe itself. One thing most players missed on the first run was that the novel itself was essentially a walkthrough. Several puzzles directly referenced scenes, character names, or timeline details from the book. If you only knew the basic plot and hadn't actually read it, you'd hit walls. I know because I tried solving a sequence without rereading the relevant chapter, and I was stuck for roughly forty minutes on a clue that boiled down to a character's middle name being mentioned in passing on page 87. Reading the book cut my total playtime significantly.

Where to Find the Archive

The original live ARG has concluded, but the entire experience has been archived. The official archive is maintained on a dedicated site that preserves all the puzzles, solutions, and community discussions. You can also find comprehensive walkthroughs on puzzle community forums. The game is free — there was never a paid component. If you're looking to replay it or solve it for the first time now, the archived version retains the original puzzles intact. No download is necessary; everything runs in a browser. Most branded ARGs are shallow. They slap a logo on a scavenger hunt and call it marketing. Hickory Dickory Dock was different because the puzzles were genuinely well-constructed. The cipher work was tight, the narrative integration was real, and the voice acting was competent. More importantly, the game respected your intelligence. It never spelled things out. It never told you when you were close to a solution. That patience was rare. One counter-intuitive thing about this kind of experience: the more you know about Agatha Christie's narrative tricks, the easier it gets. The game rewards people who have read her work before. The misdirection, the red herrings, the way characters lie — those are tools the ARG uses against you just as much as Christie used them in her novels. If you approach it fresh, you'll still solve it, but you'll hit more false paths than someone who recognizes the pattern of a Christie reveal.

The Problems

Here's what didn't work. The game required a community. A significant number of puzzles were designed to be solved collaboratively, and when the player base shrank, solving became harder simply because there were fewer people spotting edge cases or maintaining shared documentation. If you're attempting this alone now, you'll find the wiki solutions for the harder puzzles, which slightly undercuts the experience. The intent was always multiplayer problem-solving, and playing solo means you're mostly running a walkthrough at that point. There was also a period where a key website went down unexpectedly during an active phase, and players who were mid-solution lost progress on a time-sensitive puzzle. The creators eventually restored it, but the incident highlighted how fragile live ARG infrastructure is. For the archived version, this isn't an issue anymore, but it's worth noting if you're evaluating whether the experience is reliable. If you want something similar that's more accessible and doesn't require collaborative solving, the Murder on the Orient Express ARG from a few years prior has a tighter solo-friendly structure, and the Lockwood & Co. ARG did a better job of providing hints when players got stuck. Hickory Dickory Dock is worth experiencing if you've already worked through those, but it's not the best entry point for someone new to the format.