Case study · Entertainment
From a chatbot builder to a game platform of its own
Garipalli turns Italian cities into escape games played on the phone. Condense designed and built the platform behind them: a backoffice to write the stories, a web app to play them as a team, and Shopify wired in from purchase to the last puzzle.
~200
games completed a month
2 in 3
games started are played to the end
4.0+
out of 5, players' rating of both the game and the app
0
manual steps from Shopify order to game access
Garipalli production data, March 2025 – September 2026; demo and test games excluded.
The challenge
A game that outgrew its tools
Garipalli's City Escapes send teams through Italian cities, from Bergamo to Naples. Players follow a story in a chat, solve puzzles and collect sealed envelopes from partner shops along the route. Games are sold on Garipalli's Shopify store, and to brands as white-label escapes.
Before the platform, stories were written across a legacy CMS and Google Sheets, and the game itself ran on a third-party chatbot builder. Writing a new escape was slow, the player experience was bound to someone else's product, and there was no gameplay data: no way to see where teams got stuck, how long an escape really took, or how one season compared with the last.
Garipalli asked Condense for a platform of its own, one that would make stories easier to write, let a whole team play together, and record every game.
The solution
One platform, from writing the story to the last puzzle
Condense started from the stories themselves, then built the tools to write them, the app to play them and the integration that sells them.
1
Story model
Workshops with Garipalli's team turned each escape into structured data: scenes, steps, puzzles, characters, props and the partner shops that hold them.
2
Authoring backoffice
A Directus backoffice with a visual adventure editor, Italian and English translations, and one-step duplication of a whole escape for a new city or brand.
3
Team game in the browser
A web app where the story unfolds as a chat with its characters, with audio, video, hints and scores, kept in sync in real time across every phone in the team.
4
Shopify to game
A Shopify order is validated, its game set up, the invites and discount codes sent and the order fulfilled, with no manual step in between.
Later releases added offline play, so a team can keep going when the connection drops mid-route, and a map that shows each step of the escape.
Every move in a game is recorded as an event, so completion times, the hardest puzzles and the points where teams give up are now data Garipalli can read, for its own escapes and for the brands it builds them for.
The platform runs on AWS in the Milan region: Directus on ECS Fargate with PostgreSQL, the game app on CloudFront, and separate staging and production environments defined as code with AWS CDK. Since 2026 Garipalli's own team develops the platform.
Building something similar?
Condense designs and ships digital products wired to real business systems, from the first workshop to production on AWS.