Cryptid: Fact or Fiction?

A cryptid is an animal whose existence has been claimed but never scientifically proven. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Chupacabra are the best known ones. The claims rest on folklore and eyewitness reports, plus the occasional photograph that falls apart under close inspection. Cryptids are the subject of cryptozoology, a word assembled from three ancient Greek roots:

• kryptos, meaning hidden, secret, unknown, or mysterious
• zōion, meaning animal
• logos, meaning knowledge or study

People have told stories about hidden animals for millennia. Cryptozoology itself is young. It was formalized in the 1950s, largely around the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans and his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals, and mainstream zoology has never accepted it as a science.

Our game Cryptid draws on reported sightings and folklore, with a few creatures of our own. Below, we separate those sources. The first sections explain the creatures; the later sections discuss the game’s puzzles and contain spoilers.

Cryptid or mythical creature?

The distinction comes down to what someone is claiming: an undiscovered animal, or a being from folklore or religious tradition.

People usually use “cryptid” for an animal reported to exist but not scientifically confirmed, such as Bigfoot. “Mythical creature” is a broader term for beings in folklore, symbolic stories or religious traditions. These are useful distinctions rather than firm categories, and a creature can be described differently in different traditions.

The boundary can be unclear. Gremlins belong to folklore about mechanical failures, while Thunderbird traditions have spiritual significance that modern cryptid lists often overlook. A creature’s appearance on a cryptid list doesn’t settle how it should be understood.

Cryptids people look for

Seven creatures with reported sightings appear in our game: Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the Wampus Cat, the Thunderbird, the Mongolian Death Worm, and the Chupacabra.

Bigfoot

Sightings in the forests of the Pacific Northwest go back more than 100 years and run into the thousands. Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, is the large ape-like creature those accounts describe. The most famous piece of claimed evidence is the 1967 Patterson footage, and the Patterson-Gimlin film has its own detailed write-up covering both the footage and the arguments about it.

Albert Ostman, a Canadian prospector who lived from 1893 to 1975, claimed that a family of Bigfoot carried him away from his campsite in 1924. He said he remained with them for six days and escaped after they sampled his tobacco and became sick. This is Ostman’s account, not a confirmed encounter.

Yeti

In 1951, on the Menlung Glacier west of Everest, British climber Eric Shipton photographed a large footprint in the snow. The photograph became a well-known part of Yeti lore. Also called the Abominable Snowman, the creature is often described as ape-like and associated with the Himalayas.

Loch Ness Monster

The 1934 photograph known as the “surgeon’s photograph” helped make Nessie famous. It appeared to show a long-necked creature breaking the surface of Loch Ness, but was exposed as a hoax in 1994. Reports of sightings have continued; the photograph is not evidence of an unknown animal.

Wampus Cat

Ask two people in Appalachia what a Wampus Cat looks like and you can get two different animals. It has six legs in some tellings, is part cat and part woman in others, and has glowing yellow or green eyes in most of them.

Thunderbird

The Thunderbird is the clearest case of a creature sitting in both categories at once. It comes from Native American mythology, usually as a spiritual or protective being said to hurl lightning and create thunder, and it carries genuine religious significance. It also turns up in modern sighting reports of impossibly large birds, which is what puts it on cryptid lists.

Mongolian Death Worm

The Gobi desert has the best-named cryptid on this list. It is said to travel underground and burst to the surface to feed, and the stories attach a range of killing methods to it, which is how it got that name.

Chupacabra

Reports of the Chupacabra began in Puerto Rico in 1995. That makes it too recent for our story’s setting. We included it anyway, so this is one place where the game departs from the historical timeline.

The game we built out of all this

In Cryptid, a two-part expedition story, you inherit a chest from your uncle, Dr. Herbert Hughes, who never returned from his last expedition. His notes and cryptid files are your starting point. Hannah described the game in her review: “So well researched and thought out. My brain got a fantastic workout.”

Cryptid plays with 1 to 6 people, is rated 14+, and takes 2 to 4+ hours across two parts. It has 4.8 stars from 38 reviews. See what comes in Cryptid.

For a puzzle to try now, visit our free Puzzle Archive. It has fifteen browser puzzles graded from introductory to expert, with optional hints.

Mythical creatures that get called cryptids

The following creatures come from folklore and religious traditions. Their stories serve different purposes from claims about an undiscovered animal.

Fairies

Fairies appear throughout European folklore. Their magical qualities place them in a different category from a claimed undiscovered animal such as Bigfoot.

Golems

The golem comes from Jewish folklore. It is typically made of clay or mud and brought to life through mystical ritual, built to serve and protect, with great strength and very little intelligence. It has no habitat and no sighting reports, because it was never claimed to be a wild animal in the first place. It is a made thing, which puts it in a category of its own.

Shapeshifters

Nearly every culture has a shapeshifter story. The closest one to a cryptid is the skinwalker of Navajo legend, which can take the form of animals or of other people, though not usually inanimate objects.

Phoenix

The phoenix is a mythical bird associated with death and renewal through fire. It belongs to a tradition of symbolic stories rather than reports of an undiscovered animal.

The Fountain of Youth

Not every hidden thing people go looking for is an animal, and the Fountain of Youth is the legend that most often travels alongside cryptid hunting. It shares the shape of one: a specific place, a persistent claim, and expeditions that came back with nothing.

The Fountain is a legendary spring said to restore youth to anyone who drinks from it or bathes in it. Versions turn up in several cultures, including ancient Greek and Roman tales of rejuvenating waters, and it became famous in European lore during the Age of Exploration. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León is the name most often attached to the search, although his expeditions were really about claiming new territory in what is now Florida. The painting above is Der Jungbrunnen by the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, which hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Florida, for its part, now has a tourist attraction that claims to be the home of the Fountain.

Common questions about cryptids

Here are a few common questions about the term and the creatures it describes.

What does cryptid mean?

An animal whose existence is claimed but has not been scientifically proven. The word comes from the Greek kryptos, meaning hidden.

What is the difference between a cryptid and a mythical creature?

A cryptid is usually an animal reported to exist but not scientifically confirmed. A mythical creature belongs to folklore, symbolic stories or religious traditions. Bigfoot and the phoenix are familiar examples of that distinction, though the categories can overlap.

Are any cryptids real?

None of the famous ones on this page have been confirmed, and the pattern tends to follow Loch Ness. A striking piece of evidence draws worldwide attention, it comes apart under scrutiny years later, and belief carries on regardless. Two questions often get mashed together here, though. Whether undiscovered large animals exist somewhere on Earth is a reasonable thing to wonder about. Whether Bigfoot specifically is one of them is a much bigger claim resting on much thinner evidence.

What is the most famous cryptid?

Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are two familiar examples. Both have long histories of reported sightings and famous, disputed photographs or films. Fame does not establish that either animal exists.

Who came up with the word cryptid?

John E. Wall, in a letter published in the summer 1983 issue of the ISC Newsletter. The word for the field arrived first: cryptozoology formed in the 1950s around Bernard Heuvelmans, and Heuvelmans himself credited that coinage to the naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson.

For players of our Cryptid game

Everything from here on discusses Cryptid’s game materials and gives away puzzle answers. If you haven’t finished the game, stop here and return after playing.

The newspaper story about a camper carried away by Bigfoot draws on Albert Ostman’s account above. The camper’s name in the game, “Mason Barlett,” is an anagram of “Albert Ostman.”

These Fact or Fiction pages explain which parts of a game came from existing stories or records and which parts we invented. There are also breakdowns for The Fifth Column and Down the Rabbit Hole.

Your uncle's files hold the seven reported cryptids listed above, the mythical creatures in the section after that, and a handful of animals that came out of our own heads. His timeline lines up with the real one on purpose. Cryptozoology was formalized in the 1950s, right about when Dr. Hughes was supposedly making his discoveries.

The creatures we invented

We invented four of the creatures in the game by combining elements from older stories.

The Cyclogremus fuses the Greek Cyclops with the gremlin. The Terra Golum is the golem of Jewish folklore with a species name attached. The Triclops combines a mythical three-eyed creature with an onocentaur, which is a centaur with donkey legs instead of horse legs, and we added the alcohol allergy purely for our own entertainment. The Pyronex takes its inspiration from dragons.

The phoenix earned its place for a different reason. Given where your uncle's trail ends, a creature that dies in a fire and comes back was the one we could not leave out.

Illusions behind the puzzles

Several puzzles use optical illusions. These are the effects behind them, along with examples you can try outside the game.

Hidden words

The word EUREKA hidden in the moss of the troll cave belongs to a long tradition of puzzles that hide words in plain sight. The classic example is above. Can you find "The Hidden Tiger" in the illustration? A hint: the words themselves are in the stripes.

Vanishing puzzles

The fairy pillars, which rearrange to give you 10, 9, or 8 pillars with symbols and no visible gap, use a puzzle type called a vanishing puzzle. The famous one is "Get Off the Earth", created by the American puzzle maker Sam Loyd in the 1890s and sold in the millions.

You can test a version of the same trick with the disappearing bicyclist on Wikimedia. There is also a vintage egg version, and the Guardian collected a gallery of vanishing leprechauns and dwarves.

Anamorphic text and images

Anamorphosis stretches or distorts text and images so that they only resolve from one viewing angle or through a mirror. The technique goes back to the Renaissance, with Leonardo da Vinci producing some early versions. The Cyclogremus tiles, the colored crystals map, and the final illustration of the Fountain of Youth are all anamorphic.

Impossible geometries

The blue pathway puzzle takes after Escher's impossible staircase, along with the wider tradition of artists drawing shapes that could not be built. Some versions of this are very playful. How many legs does the elephant below have?

The moiré effect

The animation cards from the camera your uncle developed, and the dark orb animation map in Part II, both use the moiré effect. "Moiré" comes from the French for "watered" or "watered silk", and it describes the rippling pattern you get when two fabrics with slightly different weaves pass over one another. There is a wonderfully old-school explainer video of the phenomenon, and a more modern one with fun examples of moiré animation.

Thanks for playing, and we hope the box gave you a good couple of evenings.