The Password Game might just be the world's most infuriating website

If 2022 was all about Wordle, then 2023 might well be the year of The Password Game. The internet is littered with fun and diverting web-based games, but every now and again one proves more addictive (and infuriating) than the rest – and The Password Game is exactly that.

We've all experienced the frustration of trying to choose a password, only to be told there aren't enough special characters, or numbers, or capital letters, etc. etc. Creating a strong enough password can feel like a puzzle in itself – an idea that The Password Game runs with to sadistic effect. (Inspired to create a web-based game of your own? Check out the best web design tools.)

The Password Game, created by Neal Agarwal (whose hilarious iPhone designer game we also loved), starts innocuously enough. The site asks you to create a password, before specifying that it must contain at least five characters, then a number, then an uppercase letter. But things soon become ridiculously convoluted. Before long, you're having to ensure that your password features twice as many italic characters as bold, and the current phase of the moon as an emoji. Needless to say, it's causing players to experience a few, er, emotions.

Indeed, it's a testament to the ingenuity of the game that users are finding it so extraordinarily infuriating. And some gamers are even going as far as to declare The Password Game 2023's Game of the Year. Zelda who?