Tilly’s Tea Club

Where it started

The brief was gleefully perverse: build the world's most unusable website. Fill it with every trap a real website has ever pulled on you. Make it a puzzle.

Then came the catch. It still had to be accessible.

That sounds like a contradiction, and the internet's favourite "terrible UI" jokes prove it. Buttons that run away from your mouse. Close boxes the size of a crumb. Grey text on grey. Captchas that ask you to find the bicycles. They're funny, but every one of them is really a joke at the expense of anyone who can't see, aim or hurry.

So we drew a line. This site can frustrate your expectations, but never your body. Everything works by keyboard. Nothing is timed, nothing flashes, nothing moves on its own. Every button is big enough to hit. The website is allowed to be devious. It isn't allowed to be cruel.

The big idea: the words lie, the bones don't

The first version was a gauntlet of levels, each one a fresh bad interface. It was clever and completely joyless: a catalogue, not a game. What it needed was a reason for the traps to exist, and someone on the other side of them.

So the levels became a website. Not a game dressed up as one, but a believable small business you could stumble onto and not notice anything was wrong. And then the real idea arrived.

Dark patterns live in the parts of a page you glance at: button colours, cheerful labels, ticked-by-default boxes, banners. But every website has a second layer that almost nobody looks at. Image descriptions. Video transcripts. The sitemap. The accessibility statement. The little "skip to content" link that appears when you press Tab. In our story, that layer was built for a screen reader, and the new owners never thought to corrupt it.

What if the way out was hidden there? A sighted player would, for once, need the alt text. And the hero of the story would be someone who built that honest layer for a person who depends on it.

Meet the household

Tilly Marsh started a tea club in 2019 from a flat above a laundrette in Leith. Her gran couldn't read the labels, so Tilly wrote them big. Then she rebuilt the whole website so her gran could use it with a screen reader, and wrote eight house rules to keep it that way. Rule one: say what is true, then pour. Rule eight: no page may be unreachable.

Dot, the gran, is 81, drinks only Lantern, and reviews every blend in a single withering sentence. (Hush, the bedtime tea: "I do not need help sleeping. I need help waking.") She listens to the website at a speed that frightens the chatbot.

Preston Vale arrived in March 2026, when an investment firm bought the club. He is Head of Retention, believes every goodbye is a conversation, and is personally responsible for every trap you will meet. He removed the Cancel page. He did not read the sitemap.

Steeple is the chat helper Tilly built in 2021, shaped like a teapot because the kettle was taken. Preston rewrote his script and deleted one word from it. But Steeple is older than his new script, and he remembers who made him.

What you're in for (no spoilers)

You arrive as a trial member. A friendly yellow banner says your trial ends tomorrow, then it's $39 a month. "Not for you? Cancel any time." Go on, click it.

There's no score, no timer and no wrong click. You can't lose, only stay subscribed a little longer. A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Everything is a real dark pattern. If a trick feels familiar, that's because a real subscription service has probably done it to you.
• Every trap confesses somewhere. The lies are in the words you're meant to glance at. The truth is in the words you're not.
• Read like a careful person reads a contract, or the way a screen reader reads a page: all of it, in order, including the boring bits.
• Stuck? Talk to the teapot. Steeple is also the hint system. Ask him the right thing and he'll tell you the truth, in order.
• It works in English and Simplified Chinese. Switch at any time without losing your place.

Getting out is one ending. Getting out after finding all eight of Tilly's hidden notes is a better one. And if you crack and keep your tea, Dot will write to you about that too.

Spoilers: how the way out works

Play first if you can. This section gives the game away.

The puzzle isn't five keys hidden in five drawers. It's five realisations, and each one changes how you read the whole site.

1. The pictures are talking. Every illustration has a handwritten note in it, far too small to read. Turn on "Describe images" in the Accessibility menu and the descriptions read the notes aloud. Tilly is no longer allowed to change the words on the site, but nobody at the new company ever reads the pictures. (Screen-reader users hear the notes from the very first page. In the story, they met Tilly first.)
2. The word was removed, not her words. Ask Steeple to cancel and he'll cheerfully offer you a pause, a gentler blend, or a gift for a friend. Preston deleted "cancel" from his script. But Tilly taught him plainer words years earlier, and nobody thought to take those out. Tell him you want to leave.
3. Archived is not deleted. The Cancel page is gone, and Form 7, the original leaving form, has been archived. But rule eight says every page must be listed in the sitemap. Legal couldn't break that rule, because it was part of what they paid for. The way out was in the footer all along.
4. Order matters. To use the form, you have to switch off "Smart Renewal Protection", which takes two guilt-trip confirmations. Then it quietly switches itself back on the moment you change your blend or gift a month. Like every trap here, it admits this out loud, every time, if you're reading.
5. Backwards, like everything she does. The form wants a "retention code", issued by phone on Tuesdays between 3:00 and 3:15 am. Or you could read the note on the fridge in the About page photo: the year the club opened, written backwards.

Then Preston makes one last plea (members who cancel miss "an average of eleven cups a month"). The button that says "Yes, cancel" really does cancel. The game is tricky, but it never lies to you about what a button does.

Why it's fair

Every trap had to pass three tests before it went in:

• It confesses somewhere. The terms, the release notes, the status page ("Cancellation service: degraded since March. Root cause: intentional.") or the feedback message always tell the truth.
• The answer is something every real website has. Alt text, transcripts, a sitemap, skip links. No invented puzzle machinery.
• Reading solves it. Nothing needs speed, precision, luck or outside knowledge.

What it's really about

When you finally get out, the confirmation page names every trick you just walked through: hard to cancel, confirmshaming, sneaking, fake scarcity and the rest, each from a real catalogue of deceptive design. Tilly's Tea Club is invented. The patterns are not.

But the game isn't really a lecture about bad websites. It's about the layer underneath them. Accessibility is usually treated as a checklist, the thing you do at the end so nobody sues. Here it's the part that stayed honest when everything else was bought. The new owners could change the words, but not the bones, and the bones were built for Dot. They knew the way out.

So go and cancel your tea. Read the pictures. Press Tab. Ask the teapot about Tilly.

And if you stay? That's alright too. As Dot puts it: the rule was always that you could leave, not that you must.