The Yorkshire company transforming cities across the world into interactive puzzles

The Secret City was founded by Tom Rymer five years ago, and has set up puzzles in cities such as Sheffield, York, London, Sydney, Melbourne and New York.

The idea for the company was concieved when Mr Rymer began making puzzle trails for he and his friends to complete in his hometown of Harrgate.

“I started kind of creating these routes - and after work we’d meet up and I'd send my friends these text messages with cryptic clues of where to go,” he said, “a bit like the escape room concept but built outside.

“They worked together to solve it, and it was just a really good fun time, something to do on summer evenings with a couple of pub stops along the way.

“And basically the feedback from them was that it was a great idea and why not try and expand it and see if anyone else wants to do it.”

The Secret City asks users to solve a mystery by using their surroundings, forcing them to search for clues by considering things such as plaques, statues and infrastructure.

Many of the puzzles incorporate local history, using things like real-life crimes from the past as the basis of their story-line.

The company hopes that their games will allow people to see cities in new and interesting ways, and visit places they wouldn’t previously have considered.

“People will walk on the same street every day and they never look about, or might not read that plaque next to them- and there’s always that little bit of history or a story that you don’t know about.” said Mr Rymer.

“If you do a quick Google on where to go, you can imagine for London it'll say ‘Go to Big Ben or the Houses of Parliament’, but we want to take people to the places that they don't usually go.

“The real aim is to just showcase cities or areas that don't generally get a lot of light, and to give people who are visiting cities or who are locals themselves that little aha moment of, ‘Oh that is a place I hadn't seen’.

The company has now received corporate commissions from the likes of Facebook and Unilever and Google.

“We had some corporate groups that were using the London trail - and then they also had offices in New York and they asked if it was possible to set up anything over there,” said Mr Rymer.

“Its quite amazing because a lot of these places I've never actually been to - and people in the team have never actually been to.

"But we learn these places almost like they're our home towns, so when you actually go and visit it's kind of surreal - because you know it but you’ve never been there.”

Mr Rymer also noted how the nature of the trails also means they are able to highlight small local businesses for people to visit as they complete the puzzles.

“It's really nice because along the routes we can add in the pubs we know or we’ve researched - or the cafes, and it helps us to support local businesses along the way.

“It also means everyone gets a real sense of almost becoming a local in that area.”

Mr Rymer’s background in web programming also helped the company to develop their system for receiving messages and sending out clues, nicknamed “The Brain”.

Mr Rymer worked as a freelance website programmer after studying engineering at Loughborough University.

“That gave me the initial step to start this up, because I would program it myself,” he said.

"It would have been much more difficult without that background.”