About this game

What it is

Key of the Three Pyramids is a free browser game. You climb the three pyramids of Giza in the order the pharaohs built them smallest to largest, dodging spike traps, patrolling guards, crumbling ledges, rolling boulders and desert wind. Each summit holds a key. All three keys open the treasure chamber at the foot of the Great Pyramid.

There is no account, no download and no install. It opens in a tab and starts, on a phone or a laptop.

The pyramids are the real ones

The geometry is not invented. Each pyramid is generated from its surveyed base, height and face angle:

• Khufu — 230.3 m base, 146.6 m tall, 51.8° faces
• Khafre — 215.2 m base, 143.5 m tall, 53.1° faces
• Menkaure — 102.2 m base, 64.9 m tall, 51.3° faces

Those angles matter to play, not just to looks. Khafre is the steepest, so every ledge on it is genuinely narrower than the equivalent ledge on Menkaure — which is most of why the second pyramid is harder than the first.

The stepped surface you climb is historically right too. Giza’s smooth outer casing was stripped for building stone centuries ago, and what remains is the core masonry: a staircase of enormous blocks. An accurate pyramid happens to be a climbable one.

How it is built

The game runs on Three.js for rendering and Rapier for physics, inside a Next.js site that is prerendered to static files.

Almost nothing is a downloaded asset. The weathered limestone and the rippled sand are generated in your browser as you load the page, as are every sound effect and the whole soundtrack, which is built from oscillators over an Egyptian Hijaz scale. That keeps the game small enough to start quickly on a phone.

The route up each pyramid is generated rather than hand-placed, and is checked to be solvable before it ships: on every course, at least one of the two ways around is guaranteed to be free of walls, and no trap is allowed to sit on the single block that gets you higher.

Who makes it

An independent project, not affiliated with any official body. The Giza pyramids are real monuments and belong to no one; this is a tribute with no connection to Egypt’s antiquities authorities.

It is funded by advertising so that it can stay free to play. See the privacy policy for what that means for your data — the short version is that the game keeps your progress on your own device and collects nothing personal.